Can you Get Seniors to Work Harder?

Many high school students headed to college tend to check out during their senior year, especially the second half of their senior year. By that time, they have applied for colleges and will either get accepted or not based on the work that they have already done, but the work that they do in their senior year does not matter much in that calculation. Yet, many of these same students then enter college unprepared and have to spend their first term taking remedial courses in math and language arts. Beside driving up the cost of a college education for the state and the individual, those taking remedial courses are also less likely to make it through to graduation. In California over half of students entering the state university system (CSU) have to take either remedial math, remedial English or both.

So several years back, the CSU system partnered with K-12 to see if they could identify students at risk and help them avoid remediation. The Early Assessment Program created an augmentation to the 11th grade standard assessment that students could take to see if they were ready for college work. If a student passed this test then they would not have to take remediation in college. If they failed the test, they had their entire senior year to fix their issues before they get to college.

So, can you get seniors to work harder? Early results on the program are just starting to be available. The early results suggest that the program was able to reduce the probability of needing remediation by 6 percent in English and 4 percent in math (news article on study). Not off the charts, but this is enough of an improvement that the program probably paid for itself. It will be interesting to track this work to see if the reduction in remediation also helps increase college graduation rates.