Transitional math placement: How is quality maintained?

Author: Kathleen Almy

A note to the reader: while this blog deals with an Illinois-specific requirement, other states may find the approach used applicable to their transitional math implementations.

Transitional math courses provide high school seniors a new experience with math, allowing the student to increase their college readiness in math and gain college placement. States and colleges provide placement in a variety of ways. It’s common to still require the use of a placement test or some kind of cumulative, common exit exam for the course. Either way, the focus on a test score is a typical approach a college will gravitate towards. The reasons are simple: there is more objectivity with a test, particularly if it is computer graded or multiple choice. Plus, test grades and placement scores are easy to process in electronic systems. This efficient and simple approach works well for colleges, but not always students.

There are mountains of studies showing multiple measures placement is the gold standard of accurate college placement. The issue is that using multiple measures is complicated and often more tedious to incorporate. It works for students, but not necessarily for colleges. I don’t think that’s a good enough reason not to use it, but the difficulty of implementation will be a main reason for multiple measures being slowly integrated. And by multiple measures, I don’t mean that a college considers ACT or SAT or Accuplacer. I’m including other measures like high school course grades in certain courses and high school GPA. Grade point average, in particular, has been shown to be highly predictive of a student’s performance in college. But it’s controversial amongst college faculty. Concerns about rigor and quality immediately arise.

When transitional math is implemented as intended, a student gains placement in college from a high school grade. It’s not a placement test that opens the door to a college math class; it’s the performance in a specifically designed high school math class. But that’s a big ask of colleges. So Illinois created the concept of portability when the PWR Act, the law that requires transitional math for all high schools, was developed. 

“When transitional math is implemented as intended, a student gains placement in college from a high school grade.
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Illinois high schools are required to gain portability to comply with state requirements. That means their transitional math course has been vetted by a local and state panel to ensure the appropriate content, teaching methods, grading approaches, and grading standards are used. A student taking a portable transitional math class gets placement into certain college math classes at every Illinois community college and any accepting Illinois university. The placement is guaranteed locally but also goes where the student goes; thus, it is portable. In the next blog, we’ll delve into the specifics of this.

The idea is a great compromise for high schools and colleges and benefits students tremendously. But, as always, the devil is in the details. Criteria must be determined. Panels have to be formed, funded, and maintained. Approvals have to be communicated. It’s certainly not a simple process, but the results are significant. A student’s time in a senior high school class has tremendous value when the student goes to college. This has been true of AP classes for decades. With transitional math, not only the strongest math students can benefit from a high school course. 

As great as portability is in theory, it is not an appropriate solution for every state. I saw firsthand the complexity involved for everyone as we developed the policies to support the law’s requirements. A single test to allow for college placement is certainly simpler, but that doesn’t make it better in terms of outcomes. Some states like Tennessee rely on a strong network of trainers that work in the field to ensure fidelity is maintained with the high school transitional course. This is an excellent approach but one that requires a lot of funding and personnel. It’s challenging to do in large states. 

I recently worked with the state of Indiana on their approach to granting transitional math placement. My role was in leading a group of math teachers to develop a statewide assessment that will be piloted this spring. Students will have to earn a certain grade on the test as part of their overall course grade to gain college placement. It’s a good approach to ensuring quality, but it has challenges as well. There is still a high stakes test involved in the student’s placement, and test development and administration are full of their own challenges.

Are there any simple solutions that are student-centered? I’m not sure there are yet, but that doesn’t mean something won’t be developed. The more schools and states implement transitional math and the more heads come together to work on the issue, the better the solutions will be.

If you are implementing transitional math outside of Illinois, look at your placement requirements. Do they involve only a placement test? If they do, bring together a group of administrators and teachers from the high school and college to discuss ways to provide placement based on a course grade. What mechanisms are needed to make the process feasible while addressing the needs of both sides? A tip on this meeting: keep it small initially but have any affected stakeholder group present. For example, it may help to include someone from admissions or the testing center at the college so that logistics and current challenges can be considered. Warning: don’t allow the phrases, “we’ve always done it this way” or “our system can’t do that” to pervade the conversation. It helps to set ground rules that there will be challenges but the goal has to be a student-centered approach.

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