MOORE COUNTY — For obvious health reason, pandemics are awful, no-good things. But sometimes, they lead to innovations. This is the case with Motlow College’s Belinda Champion who recently launched at-home college placement testing.

Motlow accepts achievement test results such as the ACT and SAT. As an alternative to those measures, it also offers placement testing using the Accuplacer, a tool to help college advisors match course planning to a student’s skills and ambitions.

Aspiring college student can now take the ACCUPLACER test in the privacy and safety of their own homes. It’s a computer testing system that helps determine student academic readiness in reading, sentence skills, and mathematics for college-level work. Test results determine which courses are best suited to the student’s level of preparedness.

For some, college achievement tests like the ACT or SAT can be a psychological barrier to college-going ambitions. Poor achievement scores often demoralize students and derail college dreams. Champion, Director of Disability, Testing, and Counseling Services at Motlow, insists that this is unnecessary.

“Tennessee is a college-enabling state,” said Champion. “We are national leaders in ensuring access to college for everyone. We have already tackled the barriers associated with the cost of college through free-tuition scholarships like TNPromise for high schoolers, and TNReconnect for adult students. Now we are tackling the barriers associated with college entrance tests.”

Champion says if students have prior test scores they don’t like, remember that score is a measure of your performance on that day and is not a measure of your potential for the future.

“There are a lot of reasons why people might have poor placement scores or even no placement scores. I work with a lot of students that have taken achievement tests under very challenging circumstances,” continued Champion. “My staff are experts at helping students rewrite their college placement testing story.”

For the next available test dates and registration, please visit the Motlow State testing website at mscc.edu/testing or call 931-393-1763 or 1-800-654-4877 ext. 1763. The last day to apply for Motlow’s Summer semester is May 18. •

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