ABSTRACT
Salt Lake Community College (SLCC) offers a college skills course, "Essentials of College Study" (CS). Do students who take this course have higher grade-point averages (GPAs) and graduate at higher rates compared to students who don't? SLCC's Institutional Research Office addressed this question in an internal paper completed and circulated around the college in 2012, Gold Paper 3: "Measuring the Effectiveness of the Developmental Education Course LE 1020." The chapter reviews the literature on the impact of college skills courses, summarizes the findings of Gold Paper 3, and raises some concerns about the methodology used in that study. It presents the findings of a re-analysis of the impact of CS that uses a different methodology on a larger dataset. Gold Paper 3 reported that CS was associated with improved student performance. However, that finding did not hold up in our re-analysis and was likely an artifact of the methodology used in the original study.
