Student Readiness for Postsecondary Coursework: Developing a College-Level Measure of Student Average Academic Preparation

California’s community college accountability strategy, the Partnership for Excellence program, includes, as an aspect of the outcome assessment component of the program, a mechanism to “level the playing field” between colleges. This function is accomplished through adjustment models, statistically derived equations that “adjust” for observed relationships between exogenous variables and college-level outcomes of interest. The development of adjustment models for each of the several outcomes has relied upon an exploratory process to derive a parsimonious set of exogenous variables with nonzero (statistically significant) relationships to the outcome of interest. One previously unmeasured adjustment variable has received considerable interest in discussions of the adjustment model development process, namely the academic preparedness of entering students at each college. This article addresses the work of the authors to develop a measure of student average academic preparation for use in “leveling the playing field” in community college outcome measurement and accountability.