Ira Nichols-Barrer and Brian Gill of Mathematica Policy Research sit down with Marty West to discuss an important testing decision faced by Massachusetts: whether to keep the MCAS assessment or switch to the  PARCC assessment.

Nichols-Barrer and Gill, along with two other co-authors, are the authors of a new study  that looks at which test better predicts college performance.

They found that results on the PARCC test in math were better predictors of college success in math than results on the MCAS test were. (In other words, the MCAS sets a lower bar for math proficiency than the PARCC does.) There were no significant differences between the PARCC and MCAS English language arts tests as predictors of college success.

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—Education Next