MCC Daily Tribune

Updates on Student Placement Efforts

Faculty continue to review and adjust our processes for placing students into MCC’s college-level English and Mathematics courses as well as placement into developmental courses.  National data point to decreased student success when students face multiple stops in their educational pathway prior to registering for college-level courses.  Over the past five years, MCC has been working to improve student success through offering co-requisite course models to help students access college-level courses.  We have also been reviewing and adjusting the placement method to help achieve appropriate placement into these courses.  Efforts started in 2017, when the College began its ALP pilot wherein select students who would otherwise be placed in a stand-alone developmental English course were enrolled in ENG-101 and TRS-105 (as a co-requisite). Since then, the ALP Committee, which comprises faculty from English-Philosophy and ESOL/TRS, wave developed a stronger co-requisite (TRS-099) specifically designed to align with ENG-101’s CLOs. Moreover, ALP has been offered at scale since 2019, and prior to the pandemic, ALP student success rates were significantly higher than those of their ENG-101 peers.

In 2020, TRS math faculty updated TRS 094 so that TRS 092 could be eliminated, shortening the developmental pathway for some students. While curriculum was being developed and approved through the college’s official process, TRS 092 and 094 were put into the master schedule as co-requisite courses to speed up the transition.  The co-requisite math model was officially launched in the spring 2021 semester and TRS 092 was deactivated for fall 2021.

Continuing our efforts to reduce the developmental pathway for students, TRS reading and developmental English faculty created a course with a required laboratory that would eliminate the need for separate TRS 100 and TRS 200 courses. The proposed course is in the curriculum review process and we plan to report our progress to Faculty Senate next spring to determine the possibility of launching the new lecture/lab course in fall 2023.

In other placement news, the committee on Mathematics placement is continuing to meet in order to develop and implement a directed self-placement process for math courses and the Multiple Measures for English Placement Committee (MMEPC) has been working to refine the English Placement Model (EPM).

We will continue to update the MCC community on our progress during the remainder of this academic year and into next fall with the goal of bringing a comprehensive, data-informed model forward later in calendar year 2023.

Kimberly McKinsey-Mabry
Academic & Student Affairs
10/25/2022