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Preparation

Demographic gaps or preparation gaps?: The large impact of incoming preparation on performance of students in introductory physics (link) Salehi 2019

The results are surprisingly consistent across the institutions, with only math SAT or ACT scores and concept inventory prescores having predictive power. They explain 20%–30% of the variation in student exam performance in all three cases. In all cases, although there appear to be gaps in exam performance if one considers only demographic variables (gender, underrepresented minority, first generation), once these two proxies of incoming preparation are controlled for, there is no longer a demographic gap. There is only a preparation gap that applies equally across the entire student population.