Global Assessment Certificate Achievement as a Predictor of Meeting the ACT College Readiness Benchmarks

ACT Research & Policy | Technical Brief | June 2019 1 Global Assessment Certificate Achievement as a Predictor of Meeting the ACT College Readiness Benchmarks Jeffrey T. Steedle, PhD Jeffrey Steedle is a senior research scientist in Validity and Efficacy Research specializing in educational and labor market outcomes research and validity evidence for ACT's workforce assessment programs. The Global Assessment Certificate™ (GAC) program helps international students develop the academic knowledge, learning practices, and English language skills required to enroll at universities and earn a bachelor’s degree (ACT, 2019). The GAC program includes three levels of instruction (Level I, Level II, and Level III), each entailing a combination of required and elective courses totaling 240 hours of classroom study plus 120 hours of independent study. Courses cover reading and writing skills, listening and speaking skills, mathematics, science, computing, business, social science, psychology, study skills, research skills, problem solving, team collaboration, oral presentation, and time management. Students who achieve passing grades at each level earn the Global Assessment Certificate, which supports enrollment at GAC Pathway Universities, including 75 in the United States (ACT, 2019). Most Pathway Universities offer GAC graduates up to one year of credit, which allows them to complete their degrees faster and with less expense. This report describes research that evaluated GAC achievement as a predictor of ACT® assessment scores and meeting the ACT College Readiness Benchmarks. The ACT assessment is used to support college and university admissions decisions, and the ACT College Readiness Benchmarks are ACT scores associated with success in first-year, credit-bearing postsecondary courses (Allen, 2013). Results from this study describe GAC student achievement on the ACT, illustrate how GAC grade point average (GPA) relates to ACT performance, and reveal the relationship between persistence through the GAC program and ACT scores. In general, GAC graduates performed well on the ACT compared to test-takers in the US. GAC grades were moderately strong predictors of ACT scores, which means that students who earned higher grades in GAC courses tended to earn higher scores on the ACT and were more likely to meet the ACT College Readiness Benchmarks. Moreover, students who completed higher levels of the GAC program tended to earn higher ACT scores. These findings are consistent with the notion that learning and achievement in the GAC program support academic preparedness for university studies. Sample GAC records were filtered to include only students who completed GAC Level III between 2014 and 2018. Those records included overall GPA and grades in GAC courses. To add ACT scores to the data set, GAC records were merged with ACT records using name and date of birth. ACT scores were found for 74.2% of the GAC graduates. Since this study was predictive in nature, students were included only if they took the ACT during or after their GAC Level III studies (96.8%). The final sample comprised ACT.org/research © 2019 by ACT, Inc. All rights reserved. | R1760 ACT Research & Policy | Technical Brief | June 2019 2 4,700 students who completed GAC Level III between 2014 and 2018. When multiple ACT scores were found, the record with the highest ACT Composite score was retained. GAC Level III lasted an average of eight months, and students took the ACT an average of four months before completing their GAC studies. Students were divided similarly between GAC completion years (21.9% in 2014, 19.7% in 2015, 21.8% in 2016, 19.4% in 2017, and 17.1% in 2018). The sample was 50.9% female and 49.1% male. Students were distributed geographically as follows: 79.2% China, 14.7% Mexico, 5.0% Southeast Asia (primarily Indonesia), and 1.1% other. Measures The data analyzed in this study included GAC GPAs and scores from the ACT assessment. Overall GAC GPA on a 0.0–4.0 scale reflected grades earned in all GAC courses taken in Levels I, II, and III. This study evaluated overall GAC GPA as a predictor of the ACT Composite score, which is the average of the English, math, reading, and science scores. Note that all ACT scores are reported on a 1–36 scale. Subsequent analyses examined the relationship between GAC grades in a content area and a related ACT score. For those analyses, three additional GAC GPAs were calculated. The GAC English language arts (ELA) GPA was based on grades in GAC academic English courses focusing on reading and writing skills. Grades in GAC mathematics courses were aggregated to calculate a GAC math GPA. Similarly, a GAC science GPA was based on grades in GAC science courses. In this study, the GAC ELA GPA predicted ACT English and ACT reading scores, the GAC math GPA predicted ACT math scores, and the GAC science GPA predicted ACT science scores. This study also evaluated GAC GPAs as predictors of meeting the ACT College Rea