Predicting College Success

I spent my morning analyzing the grades of the sixty-seven juniors and seniors who dual enrolled from my school this past semester. Of the 464 college credits attempted, 440 were earned, giving us a pass rate just a hair under ninety-five percent. Half the group had a college GPA above a 3.43. I'd say this is pretty good news for our first cohort of New Tech students taking college classes.

One of the goals of my analysis was to assess how well we predicted college readiness amongst these young advanced students. While only four of the sixty-seven students who dual enrolled experienced failure, some students still performed worse than expected. Pushing students to college too early could potentially blemish their college transcript. Defining "ready" has therefore become a really big deal.

Aligning our thinking with both our college partner and the state, we placed the greatest weight on students' college entrance exam scores last year. In deciding who got to go, we let test scores trump all other valid readiness indicators such as high school GPA, teacher perception, etc.

So, how did that work out for us?

The worst predictor of student success for us was their score earned on the COMPASS, taken by our current juniors who had not yet taken the ACT. The COMPASS is used by our community college partner to place students into courses at appropriate levels. For us, it turned out that the COMPASS provided only a minor ability to predict college success (r=0.25).

The correlation between student COMPASS scores and college GPA was a low r=+0.25.

Coming in second was the ACT assessment, taken by all juniors in the state of Michigan. The ACT proved to be a fair predictor of college success (r=0.44).

The correlation between student ACT scores and college GPA was a moderate r=+0.44.

The best predictor of college success turned out to be student GPA (r=0.76).

The correlation between student high school GPA and college GPA was a high r=+0.74.

While the state of Michigan allows schools to use varied methods of determining college readiness before allowing students to dual enroll, it is interesting that they will not not allow GPA be a primary determining factor, given it's apparent ability to correctly predict student success.

What we will most likely do in the future, given this data, is create a single numerical value for each student that takes into account their college entrance exam score and their high school GPA. This would appear to provide some additional predictive ability (r=+0.82 to r=+0.86) not possible using test scores alone.

UPDATE—January 30, 2015: Looking at this with fresh eyes, I think it's important to point out that we used the minimum COMPASS and ACT scores required for college-level coursework placement with our community college partner as our cutoff for allowing students to dual enroll. We did not use the state minimum scores, which are higher. It is logical that using the higher scores would have increased these assessments' predictive ability. We are choosing to use the lower scores to increase access with the hope of keeping risk to a minimum for our students.