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Wednesday, November 16, 2016

ACCUPLACER Questions

All Oregon community colleges now offer ACCUPLACER because COMPASS is obsolete at the end of this month.  However, each community college has set their own cut scores and placement requirements, so these do not necessarily match other schools.

A huge change to Chemeketa is the allowance of Smarter Balanced scores (if high enough) for placement, with Senior English successful completion as another asset for higher reading or writing placement.  

On a practical note, this means fewer of your students will need to take placement tests.  This will be great for your students and a cost saver for us since ACCUPLACER tests are considerably more expensive for colleges than COMPASS was.

Those students who are confident that they will be applying for Chemeketa Scholars will still need placement test results, whether from COMPASS or ACCUPLACER (or a combination of the two).

COMPASS scores are valid for five years, so students will not need to retest if they have already scored well.  We will be discouraging placement testing to those who have high COMPASS placement test scores or Smarter Balanced scores.  We also encourage students that know they will be attending another college to test directly with their college.  This way, their scores will upload into that school's database automatically and the student will not need to submit scores on their own.  

I have attached a chart that will give more information regarding Smarter Balanced scores and Senior English for Chemeketa placement.  (Please note that the sentence below this chart means that a student/school will need to supply a copy of Smarter Balanced scores to a Chemeketa testing center to make the placement official.)

I also included another attachment that has other info that applies to high school students.

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