Equitable placement assessment in undergraduate German programs

The placement assessment is many students’ first encounter with an undergraduate German program on their college campus. Students’ experience with a placement exam or process shapes their understanding of what language learning will look like in a college setting and, crucially, whether college language courses are for them. It is thus a crucial aspect of student recruitment. Despite their importance, placement exams are an understudied area for German and undergraduate language programs in the United States generally. Furthermore, most placement research is concerned with empirical and quantitative investigation of the development and accuracy of placement tests rather than students’ experiences of placement or placement assessment as a recruitment tool (Lord, 2022, p. 102).

A large-scale survey of German undergraduate language placement conducted in the late 1990s revealed that most institutions used “years of experience” in previous high school German courses as the primary factor for student placement but that, in practice, these processes were often informal and involved a great deal of student self-placement (Eldridge, 1999). Much has changed in the past quarter century, and there is a need for M.H. Eldridge's study to be replicated. What can be said with certainty, however, is that many institutions have now implemented some form of online placement assessment. My own experience as a language program coordinator suggests that other aspects of placement have not changed insofar as, in practice, students often engage in some level of self-placement as they are explicitly or implicitly guided to consider their placement exam score alongside previous high school experience and advisor or faculty consultation.

This contribution first investigates how common online placement assessments such as Avant PLACE may present a barrier to placement equity and student recruitment. Likewise, I will share some anecdotes that demonstrate how informal self-placement processes may unintentionally exacerbate these barriers. Finally, I will discuss the possibility of directed self-placement assessment as a compassionate, equitable alternative to standardized online tests and informal self-placement, contributing to more inclusive recruitment practices in undergraduate German programs.

Online placement exams are increasingly prevalent in undergraduate language placement. It is increasingly common that languages across campus pool their resources, thereby securing lower prices by contracting a single provider such as Avant or Emmersion to provide standardized placement assessment services. For this reason, even smaller German programs at small liberal arts colleges (SLAC) and regional institutions use these exams, even if only as one piece of a more holistic placement process. Critical, comparative scholarship on these platforms is a desideratum. Some institutions such as Ball State University, Michigan State University, and Stanford University have developed their own in-house online placement exams, often publishing detailed accounts of their development, implementation, and efficacy (Bernhardt et al., 2008; Consolo, 2021; Imamura et al., 2022; Liu & Li, 2021; Long et al., 2018). However, similar studies conducted independently of the placement providers are lacking for contracted online placement assessments.

A brief review of the sample materials for Avant's placement assessment, PLACE, nonetheless provides a snapshot of what students experience when they take these exams (Avant Assessment, n.d.). Students are first met with a pop-up informing them that their online behavior is being tracked and notifying them of various rules, including prohibitions on note taking and the use of translation software. Students then complete a self-assessment of their listening, reading, speaking, and writing skills, selecting from a list of seven descriptors that best match their competence. Already, students are met with descriptors that expect them to be proficient in very particular genres of language, which may be unintelligible even to a highly proficient 18-year-old student who has, for example, spent a high school exchange year in a German-speaking country. For example, listening skills are measured by students’ ability to understand “current affairs programs” and “lectures,” reading skills by student's comprehension of “reports concerned with contemporary problems” and “longer technical instructions,” and interpersonal speaking skills through students’ ability to speak “for professional purposes” and in “regular interaction with native speakers.” This final descriptor is particularly troubling, even putting aside more theoretical concerns with the term “native speaker.” Many of the most proficient first-year students I encounter in the rural Midwest, coming to our programs with high scores on the AP German exam, have not encountered “native speaker” instructors, let alone had the opportunity to interact with so-called native speakers through the cultural programs and ex-pat communities that their peers in urban centers may encounter. There is a high likelihood that students who learned German in nontraditional settings (e.g., in communities dominated by second-language German speakers), students with less travel experience, and students who attended rural high schools will underestimate their proficiency if it is defined through interaction with a community of native speakers.

Following the self-assessment, students complete four skills assessment sections. To assess reading skills, they are tested on their comprehension of a weather report, a list of offerings at a butcher shop, and a menu at a restaurant. Grammar is assessed via contextually disconnected fill-in-the-blank and multiple-choice questions. For the writing section, students are asked to write a short email describing what they like to do with their friends and family. Finally, in the speaking section, students record themselves calling a language school to ask for details about course offerings. The assessment lacks cultural content besides the tired trope of menus featuring stereotypical “German” food. The exam is, in brief, uninteresting and, more importantly, not at all reflective of the way language is taught or assessed in modern undergraduate German programs. It is not the intention of this contribution to single out AVANT; other research has similarly critiqued Emmersion's WebCAPE exam for its inability to assess heritage speakers and its use of grammar-centered assessment methods that are not in-line with most institutions’ contemporary teaching methods (Amer & Cabrera-Puche, 2022). The purpose of the previous description is to put the reader in the place of a student, elucidating the barrier these exams pose to recruitment. A student who takes this exam and comes away with the impression that this is what college-level language instruction is like—standardized, surveilled, and uninteresting—is unlikely to be interested in enrolling in a German course.

Fortunately, it is my experience that these placement exams are rarely used in isolation for placement. Even in larger German programs, students are often urged to engage in some level of self-placement by considering their scores in tandem with previous experience and course descriptions, often in consultation with a faculty member or advisor. However, I have also seen such informal placement mechanisms inadvertently serve as a barrier to recruitment and, crucially, equitable recruitment.

Universities are increasingly moving toward self-contained, centralized advising models, where “all advising from orientation to departure takes place in a centralized unit” (King, 2008, p. 245; Rowan, 2019). In these models, advisors, whether staff or faculty, may not have the same language-specific expertise as former in-house advisors. In my experience with these models, well-intentioned advisors tasked with fulfilling student retention metrics often encourage students to enroll in language courses below their ability to be on the safe side, sometimes encouraging students to take languages perceived as “easy” rather than languages of student interest. On an individual level, this can demoralize students and result in them dropping their language course after finding themselves bored. At a program level, the result is that students who are perceived as being at risk for retention are less likely to be placed at a level that will allow them to complete a minor or major in normative time, resulting in fewer German majors and minors from marginalized and underserved backgrounds.

Biases about which students should take German and at what level also impact enrollment at the beginning level. During my time as a language program coordinator at an institution in an area with a strong sense of German cultural heritage, I learned from post-advising proficiency interviews and first-day intake forms that an advisor was regularly encouraging students with no stated interest in German with German-sounding surnames to enroll in beginning German to “connect to their heritage.” Students were not actively discouraged from enrolling in German based on their perceived ethnic background, and the overwhelming whiteness of this German program relative to the diverse demographics of the urban institution was clearly deeply rooted in a complex history of institutionalized segregation. Nonetheless, this was a poignant example of the subtle ways that this whiteness was enacted in the placement process before students even had contact with our program. Li et al. (2023) underline the critical first step of “awareness building” for deconstructing whiteness in language education; such awareness must extend beyond faculty to the first points of student contact with our programs (often, advising staff and placement assessments).

In an ideal world, every student would encounter a departmental faculty advisor during the placement process. However, this is impractical for larger programs in a new advising landscape. Even for smaller programs, this presents challenges in cross-campus communication in terms of reaching students who may begin the placement process with no intention of continuing with German. Instead, we must ask ourselves: Can we replicate in-house, language-specialized advising with directed self-placement assessments that can be administered by faculty or by a self-contained advising unit?

The University of Florida's Spanish program has developed an online placement program that does just this (Lord, 2022). Following a self-placement model, students are placed based on their prior language experience and self-assessment of their proficiency. Unlike the self-assessment questions from the Avant PLACE assessment, the self-assessment questions ask students to evaluate their current mastery of previously learned skills rather than their broad proficiency within specific genre types. As students proceed through the assessment, they learn how language is taught in this specific program (e.g., through course descriptions by which to judge the accuracy of the self-placement and information about how heritage speakers are defined and what courses are available to them). The assessment is short and not framed as a “test,” though students can take a traditional placement test if they prefer to do so. Unsurprisingly, this was beneficial for recruitment; a recent survey of students who do not take language at Iowa State University revealed that some students chose not to study language solely because they did not want to take the placement test.

Similarly, smaller programs that do not require or have the resources for online placement may take inspiration from Placement and Teaching Together (PTT) mechanisms used in undergraduate first-year writing programs (cf., e.g., Isaacs & Keohane, 2012). These models integrate the placement and teaching processes by, for example, having students at multiple course levels complete the same assignment during the first week of class. Students might then receive feedback during the first week from their instructor and through peer discussion as they would during the regular instructional process. Based on the second draft submission of the assignment, students and instructors can then discuss, based on a common rubric, whether a student should be moved to a different level. This assumes that an appropriate section is offered at the same time or at a time that works in the student's schedule, which may be more challenging in smaller programs. However, where feasible, PTT models ensure that the placement process reflects real classroom experience while centering both the student and the instructor in the placement process. As Lord argues, the primary tenet underlying directed self-placement is compassion; “the policy starts from a place of trust and respect for the students, who are now treated as individuals with unique backgrounds and unique needs, and who are themselves capable of determining which course is most appropriate for them” (2022, p. 105).

Indeed, many German programs advertise themselves on their websites and through their promotional materials as, in essence, compassionate, promoting small class sizes, individualized learning paths, and stimulating course material. Why should this not extend to our placement assessments? Prospective German students should be met with a placement process that respects their agency and autonomy, reflects the subject matter and approaches they will encounter in the classroom, and speaks to students of all backgrounds as potential members of an undergraduate German community.

The author has no conflicts of interest to declare.