Placement tests the placement testing process

Opposing Views and Criticisms
The critique of the mathematics placement process may be described in terms of two broad camps - those who are fundamentally opposed to the use of tests for assigning people to particular courses or programs and those who accept the placement process but suggest it needs to be refined to include the effects of other factors beside math test scores alone. Perhaps we could call these groups Rejectors and Revisors respectively.
Rejectors' Views
In the field of assessment, placement testing is seen as a subset of selection testing. According to Glaser and Silver (1994), " Selection testing attempts to measure human abilities prior to a course of instruction so that individuals can be appropriately placed, diagnosed, certified, included or excluded." (p395) The last word in that quote signals the main point in some of the opposition to placement testing. Placement tests may function to exclude people from post-secondary education rather than aid access because they may be seen as just one more hurdle. Assigning people to ability groups is seen to be a kind of academic tracking, and may actually serve to reproduce or entrench inequities rather than help eliminate them (Kingan and Alfred, 1994). For example, Glaser and Silver, summarizing Oakes (1985), note: " In studies of the academic tracking of students for mathematics instruction, data regarding instructional practices suggest that students assigned to the lower tracks of many high schools tend to receive less actual mathematics instruction, less homework, and more drill-and-practice of low-level factual knowledge and computational skill than students assigned to middle and higher tracks (p398)."
Another aspect of the exclusion or barrier view is the notion that remedial courses deter enrollment due to the extra time and money needed to complete a program (Morante, 1989), or that placement in remedial classes stigmatizes students with respect to their peers and may lead them to become demoralized and drop out (Kingan and Alfred, 1994). This kind of grouping may also have serious implications when visible minorities are "over-represented " in remedial classes.
Some opposition to placement testing and remediation derives from a financial argument combined with a touch of what might be called higher education snobbery. In this view, underprepared students and remedial courses just do not belong in college or university as their presence tends to lower standards. The time and money needed for testing and remediation is better spent on the students who are prepared and the resources they need (Almeida,1986). Aligned with this view is the notion that underpreparedness is the result of poor content or instruction in high school math courses, so the problem should be fixed there (Platt, 1987).