For example, many adult students who place into remedial courses with Compass might be able to thrive in college-level courses after taking a brief refresher on academic material that they haven’t seen for a while. The test’s limitations in measuring college readiness were a factor in the decision, Colby said in an interview. “A thorough analysis of customer feedback, empirical evidence and postsecondary trends led us to conclude that ACT Compass is not contributing as effectively to student placement and success as it had in the past,” ACT said in an email last week to Compass users.Īll versions of Compass, which was first created in 1983, will be eliminated by the end of next year, according to ACT. That number dipped to 1.9 million in 2013, and to 1.7 million last year, said Ed Colby, a spokesman for the nonprofit testing giant.
Roughly 2.2 million students took the assessment in 2012. In the meantime, ACT saw a steep decline in Compass test takers. More students at Long Beach began passing college-level courses as a result.
Long Beach City College, for example, started incorporating high-school grades. That highly publicized research helped encourage some open-access colleges to begin using multiple measures to determine placement. Yet the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College in 2012 found that up to a third of students who placed into remedial classes due to their Compass or Accuplacer scores could have passed college-level classes with a grade of B or better. And when students place into remediation, few ever make it to college-level courses, much less to graduation. That number was only 13 percent for remedial English placement. Both assessments are low-cost, computerized and relatively quick ways of assessing students’ abilities in reading, writing and mathematics.Ī 2012 study found that only one in five colleges use high school grades, class rank or any other criteria besides high-stakes standardized tests to decide whether students have remedial needs in mathematics. ACT is phasing out Compass, a popular but controversial college placement test that colleges use to determine whether students need to take remedial courses.Ĭommunity colleges and nonselective four-year institutions rely heavily on Compass and Accuplacer, a similar test from the College Board.
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