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Every college or university makes decisions about how to place students into different levels of coursework, but these choices may happen with varying levels of intentionality or forethought. Course placement may be guided by one or more of a variety of factors: a placement test score; a standardized admissions test overall score or subscore; an Advanced Placement (AP), International Baccalaureate (IB), or A-level examination score; the successful completion of relevant prior coursework in high school or college; and/or the discretion and judgments of students, academic advisors, or faculty (Ganga & Mazzariello, 2019; Hughes & Scott-Clayton, 2011; Melguizo et al., 2014). These placement decisions must carefully balance concerns about students taking courses for which they are underprepared and therefore are unlikely to be successful versus courses that are redundant with prior knowledge and therefore lead to students having slower progress and potentially becoming frustrated and disengaged.
The literature on course placement has often examined the role of placement into developmental education, which was formerly known as remedial education. This research frequently demonstrates the negative short-term and long-term effects of placing students into developmental education among students who are close to the cutoff score (see Jaggars & Stacey, 2014; Valentine et al., 2017). Other work has shown that the outcomes associated with developmental education can be bolstered through appropriate reforms to this coursework and its sequencing within the curriculum (Boatman, 2021; Jaggars & Bickerstaff, 2018; Logue et al., 2016, 2019). However, the impact of course placement within non-developmental courses has rarely been explored; such inquiry is necessary for institutions to make effective decisions about their course placement policies and practices.
Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields may be a particularly important area to examine course placement decisions, since early STEM experiences shape students' persistence and completion of STEM coursework (Bahr et al., 2017, 2022). As discussed in more detail below, course placement can affect the early academic momentum of undergraduate students, which has implications for STEM participation and success (Wang, 2017). Therefore, the present study fills this substantial and important gap in the literature by examining the following research question: To what extent does starting in a lower-level STEM gateway course predict college grades, academic good standing, credits earned, retention, and graduation? These analyses focus on...