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Sara Weissman, Reporter at Inside Higher Ed concluded, An experiment suggests colleges can help students bypass remedial courses for college-level classes by using algorithms instead of placement tests to predict academic outcomes.
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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.
The authors developed an algorithm and tested it in an experiment that included 12,544 first-year students across seven different community colleges in the State University of New York system, observing a subsample of students for two years...
The authors of the working paper acknowledged some researchers have concerns that algorithms can perpetuate racial or socioeconomic biases in the data used. They noted that while the algorithm did not close gaps in access to college-level courses, it also did not exacerbate them. The algorithm boosted placement rates in college-level classes across groups.
Source: Inside Higher Ed
