The Ironies of Mandatory Placement

Abstract

Mandatory placement may actually provide the key to opening the door to true academic, vocational, or community success despite the criticisms by some that it excludes students and restricts their freedoms.Perhaps nowhere in community colleges do more ironies exist about an ethical course of action than in the issue of mandatory placement of underprepared students. The overarching dilemma rests at the heart of what community colleges pride themselves on most-the egalitarian position of open access and the effort to provide all students with the highest quality of education. The ethical dilemma that community colleges confront concerns what is in the best interest of students-not an easy issue when considering the diverse skills of community college students. A host of ethical issues relate to the underprepared student.

Double Jeopardy: Testing the Effects of Multiple Basic Skill Deficiencies on Successful Remediation

“…As far as the acquisition of college-level math skills is concerned, degree of deficiency in math clearly is a far more important predictor than is English competency, although this is, to some extent, common sense because the outcome examined here is mathematics skill achievement. Whether this effect of math skill deficiency is due to stigma (Hadden, 2000;Maxwell, 1997), discouragement (McCusker, 1999), or some other cause remains to be determined, but it is clear that few of the students who need the most remedial math assistance ever achieve college-level math skill.…”

“…While the use of a population has substantial advantages over the use of a sample, the population addressed in this study includes only students in California's semester-system community colleges. Although California's community college system, which has annual enrollment of 2.9 million students (Turnage, 2003), is the largest postsecondary educational system in the world, and while remediation in California's system is much like remediation in the systems of other states in that placement procedures and exit standards vary from college to college (Boylan, Saxon and Boylan, 1999;Grubb and Gardner, 2001;Hadden, 2000;James, Morrow and Perry, 2002;Jenkins and Boswell, 2002;Koski and Levin, 1998;Kozeracki, 2002;Oudenhoven, 2002;Shults, 2000), the generalizability of any findings of this analysis to other states is uncertain.…”

“…Some have argued that the stigma of placement in low ability groups negatively influences students' perceptions of themselves and the subject matter, and, thereby, academic outcomes (Hadden, 2000;Maxwell, 1997). One might extrapolate from this argument that the lower is a student's placement in the remedial hierarchy, the greater is the stigma attached to that placement (e.g., placement in Basic Arithmetic is more stigmatizing than placement in Intermediate Algebra), and, consequently, the lower is the likelihood that the student will remediate successfully.…”

Assessing Developmental Assessment in Community Colleges

“…While there was once greater debate over how strictly to impose assessment and placement procedures on students, mandatory testing and placement is now commonly recommended in the literature on best practices in developmental education (Boylan, 2002) and by many community college faculty and administrators (Berger, 1997;Hadden, 2000;Perin, 2006). There is, however, less of a consensus when it comes to determining and implementing the details of assessment and placement policy, and the debate over student placement has evolved to focus on whether institutions can best make placement determinations themselves or if the process should be dictated by the state.…”

Critical Building Blocks: Mandatory Prerequisite Registration Systems and Student Success

“…While success has been demonstrated in some research studies (Abou-Sayf, 2008), opponents of mandatory prerequisite enforcement at openaccess institutions have often cited concerns that mandatory prerequisites threaten the egalitarian position behind open access to higher education (Hadden, 2000). For example, Willett (2000) reported that implementing prerequisites led to a modest increase in student performance yet also resulted in a significant decrease in enrollment numbers.…”