Placement Tests: A Tool for Community College Success

If you enroll in a community college, don't be surprised if you're asked to take several placement exams. These are not intelligence or admissions tests, but tools to help determine your level of preparedness for college-level work. Placement tests can help you and your counselor plan the best set of courses for your career goals and skill level.

What Are the Tests Used For?

Sometimes, placement test results help determine whether you’d benefit from developmental, or remedial, course work. While these courses may seem like a detour from the courses you were looking forward to taking in college, they will provide you with solid preparation to succeed in advanced courses, as well as the sorts of skills you'll use in any career.

Without such developmental work, you may be discouraged by the pace and complexity of college-level course work. Studies have found that students who begin college without the skills they need to do college-level work—even if they manage to stay in college for more than a year—are far less likely to earn a degree. 

Placement tests can also help determine whether you're ready for more advanced course work, and may allow you to place out of required courses. You'll want to do your very best on the tests, since this could possibly reduce the number of courses you'll have to take to obtain your degree. 

Either way, taking placement exams will help to ensure your future academic success. In pursuing higher education you increase your lifelong earning potential—not to mention job satisfaction—exponentially. Like anything else in life, you can only start from where you are. But as soon as you do start, you’re already on your way to a new peak of achievement.

What Should I Expect?

There are several common placement tests, one of which, ACCUPLACER®, is developed and owned by the College Board, the not-for-profit organization affiliated with this website. ACCUPLACER tests are administered individually, by computer, and are "adaptive." That means that the test responds to your answers by providing progressively more or less difficult questions. Your score is available immediately.

Other common placement tests work on a similar model, and several states and individual colleges have developed their own, customized tests.

You’ll be tested on skills that are essential for your success in college; skills such as reading comprehension, understanding sentence structure and identifying common grammar errors, and mathematics. There may also be a writing test, involving an essay, which tests your ability to convey your ideas in writing.

After you complete the tests, you'll probably meet with a counselor to determine which courses are most appropriate to begin your college career. Your first-semester schedule will be based both on the results of these tests and on your educational interests.

How to Prepare

As in any testing situation, you can do your best by following a few basic tips:

  • Get enough rest the night before your test
  • Allow plenty of time to arrive and settle in at the test center
  • Pace yourself during the exam
  • Take deep, slow breaths if you find yourself getting anxious
  • If possible, schedule your test to be administered at a time of day when you’re at your mental and energetic peak

Talk with your English composition and your mathematics teachers about ways to prepare for a placement exam. Or call the testing/assessment center at the two-year college you're planning to attend and ask for information about their placement exams and how you can prepare.