MPE Versus ALEKS

Collaboration with TAMU (Texas A&M University, College Station) for math placement exam. TAMU has conducted over five years of data gathering on a placement exam that was created as a result of NSF funding in 2009. Details of this study can be found over here. Item analysis of over 25,000 thousand students has been conducted by TAMU to ascertain the efficiency of this exam.

The first part of the project involves implementing MPE at UConn and doing analysis similar to that conducted in TAMU. The second part of the project is to compare the results from the MPE with those obtained from ALEKS. If these results show MPE to be as efficient in placing students in the appropriate freshmen level math courses, then this would result in a significant savingsĀ to the University. It will also allow the department to have tighter control on what type of questions to ask in a placement exam there by allowing more academic freedom to instructors to gauge pre-existing knowledge of the freshmen students.