Assessing Collegiate Readiness
Measure the higher-order skills students need to succeed in secondary school, college, and careers with a performance-based collegiate readiness assessment.
Discover CAE’s K–12 and Higher Education collegiate readiness assessment tools. Then, let’s chat about how CAE can help you prepare students for college and/or career success.
College readiness refers to a student’s ability to succeed in college-level coursework without the need for remedial education. It means that a student has developed the knowledge, skills, and mindset necessary to excel in college-level courses. This includes a strong foundation in core academic subjects such as math, reading, and writing. But it also includes the development of higher-order skills such as critical thinking, problem solving, and written communication.
Career readiness refers to the training and skills that a person needs to be successful in a particular career. It includes not only technical skills and industry knowledge, but also higher-order skills such as problem solving, critical thinking, and teamwork. Career readiness also involves the ability to adapt to changes in the job market and being a competitive and productive member of the workforce.
Why Are Higher-Order Skills Important?
Higher-order skills are predictive of positive future outcomes for students.
- Students who perform better on CAE assessments tend to have higher cumulative GPAs than those who take traditional higher education entrance assessments (Zahner et al., 2016).
- Students who perform better on CAE’s Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA+) are more likely to have positive outcomes after higher education, as measured by employment, salary, and enrollment in graduate school (Zahner, James, & Lehrfeld, 2022).
- Managers and advisors are more likely to give higher evaluations to students who perform well on the CLA+ (Zahner, James, & Lehrfeld, 2022).
Higher-order skills are in high-demand by employers:
- A global survey conducted by McKinsey in 2020 found that 90% of executives and managers either already saw skills gaps in their organizations or expected those gaps to develop soon.
- A six-year international research study conducted by CAE and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) found that 60% of students who enroll in colleges and universities lack proficiency in higher-order skills. Additionally, the study revealed that 44% of students who graduate from these institutions still do not have the necessary skills.
- According to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2020, critical thinking and problem-solving skills are considered the most crucial abilities that employers believe will gain more significance in the next five years. This has remained consistent since the first survey conducted in 2016. Additionally, these skills are also listed among the top 10 Skills of 2025, according to the same report.
How Collegiate Readiness Assessments Can Better Prepare Students for Post-Secondary Success
Ensuring that all students are prepared for college and career success is a complex task that requires a multifaceted approach. Of course, a crucial part of this endeavor is ensuring that students meet the academic requirements to graduate high school. However, another important element is equipping students with higher-order skills that complement academic knowledge.
Many states and districts are taking steps to prioritize higher-order skills by creating Portrait of a Graduate profiles that outline the traits, skills, and competencies that students will need the most to be successful in adult life. In order for Portrait of a Graduate goals to be met, educators need data to identify students’ strengths and areas for growth with skills like critical thinking, problem solving, and written communication. Collegiate readiness assessments like CAE’s performance-based College and Career Readiness Assessment (CLA+) provide educators with actionable data to guide instruction to help students develop their higher-order skills.
Additionally, educators, including U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona, are advocating for the reimagining of assessments in K–12 with the goal of moving away from “fill-in-the-bubble” tests that measure memorization to performance- and competency-based assessments that require students to apply the knowledge they’re learning.
Preview a CLA+ Performance-Based Assessment
Get an inside look at CAE’s collegiate readiness assessments. Try the performance-based assessment and see how our tools help students develop their critical thinking, problem-solving, and written communication skills.
How CAE’s Performance-Based Collegiate Readiness Assessments Work
CAE collegiate readiness assessments go beyond multiple choice. They identify student strengths with higher-order skills, reveal opportunities for improvement, and provide reliable insights to students, educators, and institutions.
To assess students’ readiness for their next steps, our performance-based assessments situate students in real-world scenarios that require purposeful written responses. Students are asked to address issues, propose solutions to problems, and recommend courses of action appropriate to resolving conflicts.
They are instructed to support their responses by utilizing information provided within the assessment, which may include reference materials such as technical reports, data tables, newspaper articles, office memoranda, and emails. There is no single “correct” answer, and scores reflect a range of plausible and effective response strategies – a process that, by design, mimics real-world, complex decision environments.
Students are challenged to:
- Analyze and understand data
- Evaluate the credibility of various documents
- Identify questionable or critical assumptions
- Deal with inadequate, ambiguous, and conflicting information
- Identify additional information that would help resolve issues
- Construct an organized and logically cohesive argument by providing elaboration on facts or ideas (e.g., explaining how evidence bears on the problem, providing examples, and emphasizing especially convincing evidence)
- Organize and synthesize information from several sources
- Draw on evidence from different sources in a written response.
Student reports provide each student with a summary of their results, detailing which soft skills they’re strongest in and which have room for growth. Students receive their current mastery level, skills and subskills scores along with a comparison of peers within their institution and across CAE’s U.S. norm sample. These data can be used as a roadmap to guide students and educators in charting a course to develop the skills needed to achieve their academic and career goals.
Institution reports provide an overview of a school, district, or higher education institution’s scores in aggregate form. They show how the scores compare to CAE’s validated, normed sample, and which soft skills should be prioritized for instruction. Educators and data teams can use these data to plan instruction and target interventions that will better prepare students for their futures.
Collegiate Readiness Instructional Tools
Preview our collegiate readiness classroom activities and instructional tools and see how they help students learn and build higher-order skills like critical thinking, problem solving, and written communication.
Take a Virtual Tour
Take a virtual tour of CCRA+ and CLA+ to see first-hand how CAE’s collegiate readiness assessment tools work. Then, contact us and get started building students’ higher-order skills today!