Resumen de Creating and analyzing the effectiveness of a mathematics placement policy for new freshmen.
Jeffrey K. Denny, David G. Nelson, Martin Q. Zhao
In the mid-1990s, Mercer University's undergraduate schools placed incoming freshmen in their first mathematics course, using only their scores on the mathematics portion of the SAT (SATM). This placement policy was strongly supported by the admissions office because it did not require additional testing of the freshmen in their on-campus summer orientation. Realizing that other academic measures such as a student's academic high school GPA (HSGPA) had a major impact on his or her success in college mathematics courses, a new placement measure called the Mathematics Index (MIDX), which is a function of a student's score on the SATM and his or her HSGPA, was developed by the Department of Mathematics in consultation with the Office of Institutional Research in 2002. The MIDX measure was created by considering success rates in calculus and precalculus as functions of HSGPA and SATM, and finding the level curves corresponding to a 60% success rate in precalculus and a 70% success rate in calculus. After this new placement measure had been used for several years, a study was conducted to determine the success of the new policy. This article reports the method used to create the MIDX measure and the results of our study.
