Comparing Placement Policies at a Four-Year Institution

Abstract

Placement policies are intended to match students with appropriate courses in order to improve student success, but how do you evaluate these policies? In this article, we evaluate four placement policies at Towson University by considering three categories of outcomes: long-term outcomes such as graduation and retention rates, short-term or discipline-specific outcomes including pass rates in one's first mathematics course, and access-related outcomes including the proportion of students enrolling in college-level mathematics courses. We illustrate why these outcomes are not informative for evaluating placement policies and discuss the need for a new measure to evaluate placement policies.