The community colleges in the state of New Jersey went through a process of
establishing statewide cut-off scores for English and mathematics placement tests. The
colleges wanted to communicate to secondary schools a consistent preparation that would
be necessary for enrolling in Freshman Composition and College Algebra at the
community college level. Statewide cut-off scores also allow for equity and
transferability among colleges on decisions to place students out of developmental
coursework in English and mathematics. Logistic regression analysis was used to
produce expected probabilities of attaining a grade of C or better in the courses for given
test scores. Expected probabilities were converted into statistical tests for determining
the predictive accuracy of placement cut-off scores for three tests: essay, mathematics
computation, and elementary algebra. Prior to the conduct of this research, passing scores
were set by committees with no established standard setting method. These passing
scores are evaluated here with logistic regression so that a more established standard
setting methodology could be recommended to community college officials for future
use.