Case Study: Kirkwood Community College achieves more accurate course placement and higher student success with Questionmark

Kirkwood Community College Uses Questionmark for Placement

Kirkwood Community College, a four-campus institution serving about 16,000 students, faced a recurring placement problem: many students enrolled in the wrong biology course—either overmatched by the advanced class or underchallenged by the basic course. Although Kirkwood had used Questionmark (including Questionmark Secure for roughly 10,000 secure tests annually) since 1998, the college needed a discipline-specific placement solution to assess prerequisite biology knowledge rather than rely solely on general placement exams.

Kirkwood’s Learning Services team and Biology faculty used Questionmark to build a targeted placement test: they organized prerequisite topics, contributed about 200 questions via the Word Authoring Template, browser-based authoring and a shared repository, field-tested items, and used Item and Question Statistics reports to refine questions. Two matched 40-question forms were created and scores were uploaded to the student information system to block registration in advanced biology unless the cut score was met. Implemented in fall 2007, the Questionmark-based process led to dramatically improved student success rates in fall 2007 and spring 2008 and has been extended to language placement work.

Kirkwood Community College

Rich Edwards

Professor of Learning Services