Accounting for Remote Testing in West Point’s Advanced Math Program

Abstract

When new students first arrive at the United States Military Academy (USMA), they soon find out what classes they will take during the upcoming Fall semester. Some cadets with strong mathematical backgrounds discover they have been placed into the Advanced Mathematics Program (AMP). Over the years, AMP course directors have used a variety of techniques to identify the best candidates for AMP which usually figures out to the top 30% of the incoming class. Most of these techniques considered similar criteria ranging from USMA’s own college entrance examination rank (CEER) score, which factors in SAT/ACT scores among several other scores, to their Fundamental Concepts Exam (FCE) and Calculus Placement Exam (CPE) scores. Recently, the FCE and CPE have both been remotely administered during the Summer before students attend USMA to allow for expedited placement. In this paper, we use placement and post-placement scores to measure the effectiveness of AMP’s current tier-based placement system. We found that the system results in few errors and can be easily optimized further through additional quality control measures.