The College Placement Testing Program using the Accuplacer, an academic assessment tool, assists students in becoming more ready for college level competencies in Math and English.
BATEC and its secondary school partners, like TechBoston, have been collaborating since 2007 with TechPrep Consortia in Boston, Bedford, Lowell, Greater Lowell, Fall River and Worcester; Districts Career & Technical Education, and the Boston Public Schools to address the information gap about the college placement test and to create academic remediation opportunities for IT students pursuing higher education. Many IT high school graduates who take the test are unfamiliar with the assessment placement. Parallel to the lack of familiarity with the test, a majority of test takers place into remedial mathematics courses; thus, fail to meet the math prerequisites for entry level technology courses. This impacts students’ motivation to pursue IT because they must complete on average 2 to 3 developmental math courses before being allowed into IT core major courses.
Recognizing the need to address this issue, BATEC and its partners have been devising strategies to offer early math assessment to students during their junior year. The assessments are followed up with counseling and course planning sessions, which are used to mitigate potential remedial education neeeds prior to high school graduation.
