[RUME] On-line Placement tests

[Henry Walker]

At Grinnell College, we have taken a rather different view to 
math placements, and this seems to be working quite well.

Historically for years, at the beginning of a new year,
math faculty would get an abbreviated high school transcript,
SAT/ACM scores, AP/IB scores, and other information from
our Registrar's Office.  Based on past experience, the faculty
then would determine a likely first placement in mathematics.

At one point, we decided to give an MAA placement test in addition
to check our intuitive placements.  On the basis of those
tests, we notified students of a few (perhaps 40) changes in placement.
At the end of the semester, we reviewed the revised placements.
We discovered that about half (about 20) of those revisions were 
improvements on the faculty placements, and about half (about 20)
were worse.  With that track record, we decided that the intuitive
review of high school records and standardized scores did at least
as well as the MAA test, and we went back to the faculty placements.

Then in 1992, I worked with 2 students to develop an expert system
to handle placements.  We used the same information available from
high school and from standardized scores, and we wanted the system
to match faculty placements.  In the end, we were indeed able to 
accomplish this.  The result is published in

     Henry Walker, Vikram Subramaniam, and Ivan Sykes,
     "An expert system to place incoming students in mathematics
     and computer science classes", Journal of computer science
     education vol 5, No 2 (1994), pp. 137-148.

Since that time, I have run several follow-up studies to examine
how placement recommendations compared to what students actually
took and how they did in those first courses.  This has led to
some refinements in the expert system.  

We now believe that the expert system does better than individual
faculty in placement based on high school records and standardized
tests.  With this preliminary placement, we send a letter to each
incoming student and advisor indicating the placement and the
data underlying that placement.  If the student has further
information or questions, the student is invited to talk to 
math faculty during New Student Days.

The current system has about 90 rules and has performed very 
well over the years.  An on-line form using this system is
available from the department's home page:

    http://www.math.grinnell.edu

Following links "For prospective students", "placement", and
"click here for your tentative placement".

Interestingly, I have mentioned this at talks at various conferences.
For example, this is major part of a talk on expert systems that I
gave at UNITEC Institute of Technology in New Zealand.  Slides are
available at

     http://www.cs.grinnell.edu/~walker/talks/luncheon-series/expert-systems.ht
ml

As far as I know, this has not been tried by others.  

Henry

-- 

Henry M. Walker
Samuel R. and Marie-Louise Rosenthal Professor
    of Natural Science and Mathematics
Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science
Department of Mathematics and Computer Science
Noyce Science Center
1116 8th Avenue
Grinnell College
Grinnell, IA  50112-1690
641-269-4208
Fax:  641-269-4984 and 641-269-4285
http://www.cs.grinnell.edu/~walker/