Southeast Missouri State University officials discontinued MAPP testing earlier this year, but have recently had to overturn their decision. Southeast is now requiring the MAPP 2 test for students graduating in the spring and for the foreseeable future unless an alternative test is approved by the State of Missouri.
The university was notified that it needed to keep MAPP 2 to allow Southeast to receive additional state funding, forcing the university to bring the test back for the spring semester.
Many students that are graduating in May were told that they didn't have to take the MAPP 2 test, but now they will not be approved for graduation until the MAPP 2 Exam is scheduled and will not receive their degree without taking the test.
MAPP 1 will stay discontinued and will no longer be given to incoming freshmen, and MAPP 2 will not be needed for those graduating in December.
The MAPP test, or Measure of Academic Proficiency and Progress, is a two-hour online exam that was required for incoming freshmen (MAPP 1) and graduating seniors (MAPP 2) for the state funding as well as to see how students improved over their time at Southeast.
When the state legislature decides to increase universities' base budget, they look at five performance funding measures including retention, graduation rate and the student learning outcomes, where the university has to surpass "milestones" to pass each section.
"If we miss any one of those, we lose 20 percent of the additional money," Bill Eddleman, provost of the university, said. "So we want to make sure we have that all ready to go."
The State of Missouri currently only allows three tests to be used to measure what students know when they graduate, including MAPP, Collegiate Assessment of Academic Proficiency from ACT, and Collegiate Learning Assessment from the U.S. Department of Education.
The university wanted to get rid of the program because MAPP testing has become more costly than originally expected, leading the university to have to pull money from other departments to pay for it each year. The test also posed logistical problems for the university, according to Dave Starrett, the dean of Academic Information Services as well as the director of Kent Library.
"It's a two-hour test. It's done on a computer, and if you're doing 2,200 students a semester, that [is what] the testing services are doing. They are doing MAPP testing from 8 in the morning to 10 at night, five days a week and on weekends, plus the regional campuses, so logistically it's very difficult," Starrett said. "And that means that the testing services personnel, for certain periods of the year, they are doing nothing but MAPP. Therefore they aren't able to provide the other tests we should, so it's a resource draw in that way as well."
When the university was deciding which test to use in 2008, they also wanted it to be used as part of Southeast's participation in the Voluntary System of Accountability as well as to meet higher learning commission accreditation requirements.
"We had to choose one of those three, and so we had a committee -- the University Studies Council got together and determined MAPP was the best instrument for us," Starrett said.
"Since then, we've started doing student learning outcomes as an assessment here internally, and that meets the requirements of the higher learning commission and the voluntary system of accountability. That allows for a new system, VALUE from AAC&U and we're currently piloting that, so that would have us meeting the requirements of VSA. So it's just the state now that requires one of those three nationally normalized instruments."
The university hopes that the state will eventually allow them to use the VALUE testing instead of the MAPP testing to receive performance funding.
"We would be trying to make the case that the VALUE is an appropriate instrument and be making that case to the state that they could add that to their list of acceptable general education assessment," Starrett said. "It's out of our control, but the state is piloting the VALUE rubrics in a separate project unrelated to this that we're also involved in, so there is indication that the state is looking into the VALUE rubrics and might consider it at some point."
The VALUE testing consists of 16 different rubrics that are used to score papers students would have already had to write. The scoring is similar to how students are graded for the writing proficiency exams, WP 002 and WP 003.
"People sit down, they read it, they give it a score based on the rubric," Starrett said. "This is the same idea, but it has 16 different rubrics. There's critical thinking, written communication, quantitative literacy, information literacy, teamwork, creative thinking. There's a whole list of them, and so what we would be doing is having some faculty get trained on the scoring. They would take assignments from, we are thinking UI 400 level classes, and they would sit down and they would read those assignments and then they would assign a score based on the rubric. Is the level of critical thinking rudimentary, is it solid, is it outstanding, that kind of thing."
Eddleman added that one of the advantages of the VALUE testing is that it uses assignments that students have to do anyway, and since the tests use actual assignments, students have an incentive to work hard and do their best work possible.