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Board Approves Revised TSI Exam
The THECB’s board approved (agenda/webcast) an updated version of the Texas Success Initiative (TSI) exam that is used to determine if students are ready for freshman college work — and agreed that 100 percent of students who are found to not be college ready as reflected on their TSI scores can go ahead and take entry-level college courses for credit while receiving developmental education support.

The updated TSI exam will replace the current exam on Jan. 11, 2021, and will continue to be administered by the College Board.

  • Background: The TSI is the test that students have to take in order to enter a Texas public college or university as a freshman to show they are college ready — unless they have proven they are college ready by another means (such as by virtue of their scores on math and reading/writing portions of the SAT, ACT, the English II/Algebra II STAAR end-of-course high school exams, etc.).

    Click here for the coordinating board’s info page about the TSI and related developmental education topics.

Jerel Booker, assistant commissioner for college readiness and success, said that the new TSI assessment incorporates into the test “the great deal that has been learned” regarding college readiness, K-12 through higher education, and developmental education since the original TSI exam debuted seven years ago.

Booker said the updated TSI, which was designed by the College Board, is crafted so that 70 percent of students taking it could be expected to earn a grade of A, B or C on entry-level freshman college courses.

Corequisite Instruction
Another part of the adopted rule increases from 75 percent to 100 percent (as of the Fall 2021 semester) the percentage of developmental education students to participate in the corequisite instruction whereby they will take entry-level college courses as freshman while at the same time participating in non-credit developmental courses and activities designed to get them college ready instead of the student completing developmental activities first before taking for-credit college-level courses.

Booker said the affected students who will be eligible for the corequisite model will be those whose TSI scores were just below what they needed to be to show they are college ready.

Booker said as the percentage of students required to participate in corequisite programs has increased gradually over the years (per a 2017 legislative mandate), the state’s higher-ed entities have seen “thousands and thousands” of students succeed in college under the corequisite model.


  • Additional info: Click here for the coordinating board’s TSI info page, and here for updated TSI-related reports.