Education Policy, Business and Technology

California Colleges Dumping Test Scores, Adopting GPA to Define College Readiness

THE Journal: Some state legislators were listening last year when a report from Education Northwest encouraged the use of grade point averages and school work in helping to determine how "college-ready" prospective students were. Traditionally, schools have used placement tests such as the SAT or ACT to decide whether a student needed to attend non-credit remedial classes before they could move into credit-bearing courses. Those test-based measures, however, have held some students back from ever obtaining their degrees.

Now a new law in California has locked the use of GPA into place, at least for community colleges. Assembly Bill 705 requires those schools to use high school performance in course placement decisions. The new bill authorizes the state's Board of Governors, which sets community college policy, to establish regulations for achieving two goals: 1) to maximize "the probability that a student will enter and complete transfer-level coursework in English and mathematics within a one-year timeframe"; and 2) to ensure that a student enrolled in English-as-a-second-language (ESL) instruction "will enter and complete degree and transfer requirements in English within a timeframe of three years."

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