ACCUPLACER® to Launch New Suite of Diagnostic Assessments
The College Board’s ACCUPLACER® program will launch a new suite of diagnostic assessments on Jan. 4, offering high schools, community colleges and universities an enhanced tool for identifying students’ strengths and weaknesses as they transition to higher education.
The new ACCUPLACER Diagnostic tests cover four core subjects: reading comprehension, sentence skills, elementary algebra and arithmetic. In addition to a raw score, students and administrators can see detailed reports indicating areas of proficiency and weakness within those subjects.
“We are responding to a national concern about student preparedness and increasing remediation,” said David Parmele, executive director of the ACCUPLACER program. “Our ACCUPLACER users have been asking for something like this, and after two years of development, we believe we have a valuable tool for them.”
The diagnostic tests will be available in the current platform alongside the placement tests. The new assessments include three types of reports. The individual score report gives a student immediate feedback with details about skills that need improvement and also delivers customizable messages from an institution. The diagnostic test summary report gives analysis of all student results and can be used to design interventions and monitor students’ progress over time. Lastly, the diagnostic test score roster allows institutions to run reports on all student results or all test results for an individual student; its results can be exported easily into a variety of formats.
“In the best practices we see, faculty from high schools and community colleges can sit together and discuss this bridge from high school to postsecondary education and identify what students need to work on. … These messages mean more when they come with a postsecondary connection,” said Jonell Sanchez, director of academic outreach and program development. “We know that students who must undergo significant remediation are less likely to continue in their pursuit of a college degree. We hope that by using these assessments cooperatively, high schools and colleges can minimize the remediation that students need to transition to college-level work.”
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