Did The Sat-w Section Place Gsu Students Well

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Setting aside statistics, were any writing students actually misplaced into College Writing in 2007 If so, did they succeed in the course anyway In Wholesale Jewelry order to gauge the impact of this change and to assess the placement instrument, the GSU WPA designed a small investigation. A supporter of Moss's view of the "value of teachers' contextualized judgments", at the close of the first semester, the WPA asked all College Writing instructors to identify those students they believed were initially underprepared to take that course (she also asked Intro Writing faculty to identify those who could have gone straight to College Writing). The WPA was able to gather a substantial group of students who were judged misplaced by their instructor into a study cohort, what we call the "Misplaced" Cohort. Forty different College Writing teachers reported 161 students in 79 different sections, or 12 percent of the total College Writing population, as underprepared for College Writing. Because instructors of 40 sections did not respond, we can estimate that the true misplaced student cohort ...
... might be as much as 2 5 percent larger. Comparative analysis of this group of misplaced students against other populations revealed major problems in the SAT-reliant placement process.

The direct judgment of misplacement of 25 percent of students in College Writing from these students' actual GSU writing teachers is strong evidence that the initial placement process was deeply flawed. Further, over half of the 161 students in the Misplaced Cohort were unsuccessful in College Writing, meaning that they did not earn a grade of even a C. The group had an average GPA in Jewelry On Sale College Writing of only 1.57, below a C- and the 2.0 GPA required maintaining academic standing. Further, only 22 percent of these students received a grade of C+ or better. Fifteen percent failed outright. None received an A or A-. Thirteen students withdrew. Sixteen more received Ds. Further, this group of students continued along the path of low success more broadly. By the end of the first year, the average GPA of the Misplaced Cohort who were still in school was 2.36, well below the university-wide average of close to a 3.0, and slightly lower than the average of the presumably weaker students who were placed into Intro Writing to begin with and who ended the year with an average GPA of 2.42. Yet these 161 students averaged an SAT-W score of 460, 50 points above the GSU cut score. There was also a broad range of scores; a few students judged as actually underprepared by their teachers even scored 600 or higher on the SAT-W.

Finally, can we say how well the Intro Writing students fared when they went on to take College Writing Of those students who enrolled in College Writing within one year, 88 percent passed and, more impressively, 67 percent earned at least a C grade. Notably, comparisons between the Misplaced Cohort and the Intro Writing students speak to the value of Intro Writing and the hazards of misplacement: 49 percent of the Intro Writing students received a C+ or better in College Writing, whereas only 22 percent of the Misplaced Cohort did as well.