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LAURA HOPE: Traditionally, what's happened for students
is, the first time that they set foot on a college campus
in the community college system, they
are asked to complete an assessment test.
And what we've determined, as a result of extensive research,
is that those assessment tests have historically
been underplacing students to the detriment of many students'
opportunity to access transfer-level coursework.
So students may have completed Algebra 1 and Algebra 2
in high school and yet be forced to complete arithmetic
in community college.
LENA CAREW: It takes only a fraction
of a second for students to see what this means.
The moment you say, you don't have to take this placement
test, or you don't have to take these remedial classes that
don't count towards your degree, they say, sign me up.
HELEN: When I was 17, I took the placement test straight out
of high school.
That's the thing that they told me I needed to do.
So they didn't use any transcripts or anything
like that.
That's possibly one of the other options you can do.
They just asked me to do the placement test.
And, obviously, I didn't do very well,
because they put me in a remedial class at one level
below.
When I took it, I dropped the class, because I just--
I didn't like it.
JACQUI IRWIN: When we were looking
at the numbers of students that were taking remedial and never
finishing a single level-transfer course,
we realized that there was big problems.
When we see that the average student spends
5.2 years in community college, it's a problem for the student.
It costs them a lot of resources.
They still have to pay for their living expenses.
Some of them have to raise families.
So it's very expensive for them.
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LAURA HOPE: So what AB 705 invites students to do
is access that transfer-level coursework in both mathematics
and English.
The college makes a pledge to help
students complete that transfer-level sequence
within the first year.
And that gets students well on their way toward their transfer
and career goals much sooner.
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Our fondest hope for the community colleges with AB 705
is that this is going to be a structural change, not just
a change in practices, but a structural change that's
going to reduce the numbers of barriers
that students experience a lot of times
during their onboarding process.
We trust that students are capable of passing
transfer-level classes.
This will help students, much more quickly,
get into the careers that they desire.
This is really trying to increase student success,
and that's good for all of us.
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