Diagnostic Assessment

In January 2012, the Board of Governors of the California Community Colleges adopted recommendations from the legislatively mandated Student Success Task Force. They included a recommendation that California’s community colleges develop “diagnostic” assessments for use across the system. These would provide detailed information about each student’s specific academic strengths and weaknesses. If implemented, they would be a component of new assessments that all community colleges in the state would use to place under-prepared students into “developmental” English and math courses below the college level.

One goal of this recommendation is for the diagnostic information to enable faculty at individual colleges to make adjustments to their developmental curricula to better serve under-prepared students.

As California takes on this challenge, it can learn from the experiences of several states that have already developed, or are developing, statewide diagnostic tests for their community colleges. These states’ reforms are still in their infancy, and how they will play out over the long term is not yet clear. But their efforts help clarify the crucial issues for California to consider and how the ambitious reforms envisioned by the Task Force might differ from those being undertaken in other states.