For Release June 25

South Dakota University Students’ Performance Exceeds National Averages

MADISON—The South Dakota Board of Regents, at its regular business meeting on the campus of Dakota State University, heard a report today on the results of the proficiency examinations taken by sophomores enrolled in the six regental universities. In all academic categories the scores of the 1,848 rising juniors who took the exam exceeded the scores of the national reference groups used as a basis of comparison.

"We are very pleased with the results," said Regents President James O. Hansen. "We have known for some time that we are offering a superior education in South Dakota, but we did not know until now just how much more our students are learning than students in comparable colleges and universities. This kind of documentation will lend weight to their credentials when our students look for jobs or enter graduate school," he added.

The ACT College Improvement Report documents students’ gains in academic achievement. "The exam tells us how much value the universities have added to the education that the students bring with them from high school. The focus is on the change from the student’s score level on the ACT test in high school to the score level on the CAAP test in the sophomore year of college," said Dr. Lesta Turchen, Senior Administrator with the Board of Regents.

Both exams are produced by American College Testing, based in Iowa City, Iowa. Most South Dakota high school students planning to go to college take the ACT, which is used by higher education institutions to measure preparation for doing college level work. The CAAP, Collegiate Assessment of Academic Proficiency, is designed to assess a student’s level of competency at the end of the sophomore year and is comparable to the ACT.

The scores of South Dakota students are compared to the scores of students in the appropriate reference group. "In 1998 a total of 43,000 students, attending public or private four-year colleges and universities, have taken the CAAP," said Turchen. "They comprise the reference group. It is important to remember that we are not comparing institutions, but rather we are comparing students who have similar initial ACT scores." To arrive at percentage gains in achievement by South Dakota students, the ACT scores of entering freshmen at each South Dakota university are compared to their scores on CAAP. The percentage gains in achievement by South Dakota students are then compared to gains by students with similar ACT scores attending other universities, Turchen explained to the Regents.

To interpret the value added to education, the student scores were differentiated into categories ranging from higher than expected gains to lower than expected gains. Four academic areas were tested: writing, reading, mathematics, and science reasoning.

"Overall, the percentage of students making expected or above expected gains surpassed the reference group gains at every one of our institutions," said Regents Executive Director Robert T. Tad Perry. "In some instances the South Dakota students were far ahead of their reference group."

The exam was taken by 1,848 of the 1,942 eligible students during a two-week period in April. The exam was given to sophomores in 1997 and 1996 as a pilot. This is the first year that the results of the proficiency exam will have a bearing on the individual student’s course of study at a South Dakota university. A total of 187 students throughout the system will need remediation as a result of the exam. They will receive additional instruction and retake the test. Every student must receive a satisfactory score on each of the four parts of the proficiency exam before he or she will be allowed to graduate.

"Our purpose in requiring the proficiency exam is to measure the value we add to education, compare our student scores to national norms, provide individual students with feedback on their performance, and assist faculty in assessing the curriculum," said Regent Pat Lebrun, chair of the Committee on Academic and Student Affairs. "We think this exam has met all of our expectations. We can now document that, taken as a system, our students score higher than the national average on every single measure of skills."

Attached are tables displaying the comparisons of South Dakota students to their reference groups.

1) The South Dakota system-weighted average indicates the strongest curriculum areas are reading and science reasoning. As the tables of scores below indicate, the system-weighted average was above the national mean in all areas.

2) The tables below indicate the percentage of students at each level of gain in achievement by individual area. The "expected level of gain" is that increase in academic achievement that each student at any given ACT score can be expected to make after two years of college. The level of gain is based on the average performance of all students nationally who entered college with that same ACT score.

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