College Readiness Assessment
Category: Pathways to and Through Postsecondary
We apply Item Response Theory (IRT) to high-school transcript data, treating courses as items and grades as ordered responses, to estimate student transcript strength (θ̂) and course difficulty on a common scale. IRT estimation orders courses plausibly by difficulty, differentiates students with identical GPAs, correlates strongly with SAT scores, and demonstrates more than twice the SAT’s power to predict college completion — also outperforming both GPA and a composite transcript factor (η̂) that combines GPA with counts of AP/IB and STEM courses. θ̂ yields narrower racial/ethnic, but wider gender, disparities than the SAT. θ̂ shows a notably smaller Asian–White disparity than η̂, since Asian–White differences in AP/IB course counts far exceed differences in full-spectrum course difficulty as measured by IRT.
Keywords
Transcripts, Inequality, College Admissions, Item Response Theory
Education level
Topics
Document Object Identifier (DOI)
10.26300/48d6-mx29
