At more than 70 percent of colleges, placement tests determine whether students need to take remedial courses. If those tests are inaccurate, students may find themselves incorrectly placed on a remedial track and enrolled in noncredit classes that delay them from earning their degrees and increase the cost of their education.
A working paper, one in a series released by the National Bureau of Economic Research in June, suggests that placement tests could be replaced by an algorithm that uses a more wide-ranging set of measures to predict whether a student would succeed in credit-bearing college courses.
