Fall assessment sessions and online testing
September 5, 2008 Fall assessment sessions have taken place at about half of the institutions, and student participation rates are quite good overall. So far, more than 4,500 students have participated in the 2008 cohort of the study. Nine hundred students completed the study at Millersville University, and another 800 participated at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). Bard, Hobart and William Smith, Ripon, WPI, Warren Wilson, and Wabash have participation rates of around 90% or higher of their entering classes.
We’ll continue to keep you updated on the fall sessions, and we will post final student participation numbers once everyone is finished. We appreciate your hard work in recruiting (strong-arming? begging?) and testing (and testing, and testing) your students.
We have also heard a bit of news from ACT, Inc. about the online version of the spring assessment. ACT does not want to put the CAAP Critical Thinking Test online. This test is a secure test, and they are concerned about the possibility of students making copies of portions of the test as they take it in an unsupervised setting. We have heard your strong desire for online versions of the spring assessments, so this is a bit of a setback. However, we are moving forward with creating online versions of all the other elements of the spring assessments and surveys, and we will keep you updated as we develop draft versions of these assessments.
– CB and KW