The community colleges in the state of New Jersey went through a process of establishing statewide cut-off scores for English and mathematics placement tests. The colleges wanted to communicate to secondary schools a consistent preparation that would be necessary for enrolling in Freshman Composition and College Algebra at the community college…

Cut scores are used in a variety of circumstances to aid in decision making through the establishment of a clear cut line between adjacent categories. Community colleges regularly use cut scores on placement tests to decide the appropriate course for each beginning student: the first college-level course or a developmental course, depending on…

The Course Placement Service of the American College Testing Program (ACT) uses logistic regression to model the relationships between outcomes in standard college courses and placement test scores. The logistic regression results are used together with empirical test score data to obtain estimates of validity statistics (e.g., proportion of…

A study was conducted at St. Louis Community College to validate the Nelson-Denny Reading Test (NDRT), Form C, as an instrument for student placement, to empirically establish a cutoff score for a mandatory reading improvement program, and to provide more complete and meaningful feedback to students about their reading test results. The study…

Describes a study done at Suffolk County Community College (New York) that assessed the validity of the College Board's Computerized Placement Test in Reading Comprehension (CPT-R) by comparing test results of 1,154 freshmen with the results of the Degree of Power Reading Test. Results confirmed the CPT-R's reliability in identifying basic…

California's College of the Canyons has used the four Mathematics Diagnostic Testing Project (MDTP) tests to assess students' abilities in basic and college math since spring 1989. These four reports dated June 1993, July 1993, May 1994, and June 1994 examine the predictive validity of the MDTP tests and the cut scores used to place students. The…

The College Board's Spanish Listening-Reading Test, designed to measure student ability and knowledge, is required of all students with previous knowledge of Spanish, however acquired, who have no college credit in Spanish and who intend to enroll in University of Texas, Austin, Spanish course. With satisfactory performance on the test, eligible…

The Subject Examination in Analysis and Interpretation of Literature from the College Level Examination Program (CLEP), was administered to 188 English literature students, to determine the appropriate score range for granting credit for their course. Scores ranged from 32 to 75 out of a possible range of 20 to 80, the average score was 51.52. The…

In 1982 and 1983 the Measurement and Evaluation Center of the University of Texas at Austin conducted a set of three studies analyzing student performance in a physics course required for engineering students (Physics 303K) in relation to the students' scores on the College board Mathematics Level 1 and Physics tests and to an introductory physics…

In Fall 1994, the San Diego Community College District (SDCCD), in California, conducted a study to determine the validity of the Mathematics Diagnostic Testing Project (MDTP) placement test. The MDTP provides tests at four levels (i.e., algebra readiness, elementary algebra, intermediate algebra, and pre-calculus) and is used in the District for…

At the request of the Department of Mathematics at the University of Texas Austin (UT Austin), the Measurement and Evaluation Center conducted a validity study to assist in revising the department's placement policy for Mathematics 403K (M 403K). The existing decision score on the College Board Achievement Test in Mathematics Level 1 (460) was…

A study was conducted at Miami-Dade Community College (MDCC) to determine the comparability of the two tests used in Florida to assess students' entry-level skills, the Florida Multiple Assessment Programs and Services (MAPS) battery and the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). The study also sought to determine the effect of altering SAT cutoff scores…

Because of the high rate of failure of engineering students in a required engineering physics course at the University of Texas at Austin, College Board Achievement Test (CBAT) scores in Mathematics Level 1 for 537 students enrolled in the course were compared with their physics grades. Performance on the mathematics section of the Scholastic…

Local teachers and other school personnel in Hawaii expressed a need for operational guidelines to use in deciding whether or not to refer students for diagnostic evaluations for specific learning disabilities (SLD). This project was designed to evaluate whether the Windward Rating Scale (WRS), a locally-developed teacher rating scale of student…

Screening refers here to the process of making an initial selection of those who need further diagnostic evaluations. A screening process which effectively selects true learning disability (LD) cases from a population reduces the number of incorrectly selected non-LD children who would be needlessly given costly psychoeducational evaluations.…