California’s AB 705: Placement, AB 1705, and Financial Aid

California’s AB 705 requires every one of the state’s 116 community colleges to place you into transfer-level English and math using your high school coursework, grades, and GPA rather than a standardized placement test, and to give you the support you need to finish that transfer-level course within a year. Signed in October 2017 and effective January 1, 2018, the law was later strengthened by AB 1705 in 2022, which extended similar rules to STEM pathways and closed loopholes colleges had used to keep students in remedial sequences.¹

How Placement Works Now

Before AB 705, a timed placement test largely decided whether you started in a college-level course or in a remedial sequence that could stretch two or three semesters. That system is gone. Colleges now must place you using one or more of the following: high school coursework, high school grades, and high school GPA. Standardized tests can still exist, but only as advisory tools to help you pick courses, not as gatekeepers.¹

Education Code Section 78213(c)(3) builds in four protections when colleges use multiple measures:

A low score on one measure must be offset by a stronger result on another. A single weak indicator cannot push you into a remedial track.
Multiple measures can only raise your placement, never lower it.
If any single measure shows you’re ready for transfer-level work, that alone is enough.
Colleges cannot make you retake material you already passed in high school or college, or for which you received credit through prior learning.

Using high school GPA on its own counts as sufficient use of multiple measures under the law, because a GPA already reflects years of coursework. In practice, a C or better in high school precalculus should clear you for a college calculus course without any college-level algebra or trigonometry in between.²

What Happens If You Don’t Have High School Transcripts

Adult learners returning after years away, students educated outside the U.S., and anyone else without accessible high school records still have a path in. When a college cannot obtain official transcript data with reasonable effort, the law allows two alternatives: the college can accept self-reported high school information, or it can use guided self-placement.³

Guided self-placement is a structured reflection on your academic background and goals that ends with a course recommendation. It is not a placement test in disguise. The Chancellor’s Office explicitly prohibits colleges from embedding sample problems, skill assessments, or mastery demonstrations into the guided placement process unless separately approved.³ Its purpose is to inform your choice, not to screen you out of transfer-level courses.

Concurrent Support Instead of a Remedial Sequence

Placing more students directly into transfer-level courses only works if colleges back that up with real help. AB 705 requires colleges to offer concurrent support (sometimes called corequisite support) for students in transfer-level English and math who may not feel fully prepared.⁴

The support typically shows up as a linked lab section or supplemental instruction running alongside the regular class, adding time on difficult material without adding a whole extra semester. By fall 2024, about 26,400 first-time math students (roughly 21 percent) were in corequisite sections, a 43 percent increase from fall 2021. Success rates in those sections reached 51 percent in fall 2024 after dipping below 50 percent in the two prior years.⁵

For STEM pathways specifically, colleges must provide concurrent support (rather than remedial prerequisites) for students who haven’t passed Algebra II or the equivalent and who have a GPA below 2.5.

If You’re an ESL Student

English as a Second Language students operate under a related but distinct rule. Colleges must use multiple evidence-based measures to place ESL students, with the goal of maximizing the probability that you complete degree and transfer requirements in English within three years, rather than the one-year window that applies to English and math generally.¹ Full implementation for credit ESL courses began in fall 2020.

One important boundary: if you already have a U.S. high school diploma or equivalent, you’re placed under the standard AB 705 high school performance rules, not the ESL-specific provisions.⁶

What AB 1705 Changed

AB 1705, signed in 2022, was the legislature’s response to uneven compliance with the original law. Some colleges were still placing large numbers of students into remedial courses or requiring unnecessary prerequisites. The updated statute sets a sharper standard.

A college cannot recommend or require pretransfer-level English or math unless both of the following are true: you are highly unlikely to succeed in a transfer-level course based on your high school GPA and coursework, and the pretransfer-level enrollment will actually improve your probability of completing transfer-level work within one year.¹ The second condition matters most. A college has to demonstrate the remedial course helps, using data. Belief isn’t enough.

AB 1705 also spelled out reasons a college may not use to route you into pretransfer-level courses:

How long ago you graduated from high school.
Whether you belong to a special population, including foster youth, veterans, economically disadvantaged students, or participants in programs like EOPS, DSPS, Umoja, Puente, or MESA.

These prohibitions target a pattern the data had exposed: older students and students from historically underserved groups were disproportionately placed in remedial tracks regardless of their actual academic records.¹

STEM Pathways

STEM programs got their own rules. Under AB 1705, a college may require no more than two transfer-level prerequisite courses before the gateway STEM calculus course, and each of those prerequisites must be validated as effective. Validation means the college has shown, with data, that the prerequisite improves students’ likelihood of completing calculus (and, where applicable, the second required calculus course).²

If a college cannot validate a STEM prerequisite, it must stop requiring or recommending it. Students who graduated from a U.S. high school or equivalent must then be placed directly into gateway calculus. The law doesn’t ban prerequisite courses. It requires colleges to prove they work and to drop them if they don’t.

Why This Matters for Your Financial Aid

Federal Title IV rules cap the amount of remedial coursework that counts toward your enrollment status for financial aid purposes at one academic year: 30 semester hours, 45 quarter hours, or 900 clock hours. Beyond that ceiling, additional remedial courses no longer count toward the enrollment level used to calculate your aid. Remedial courses must also be at least at the high school level to qualify for federal aid at all.⁷

Before AB 705, students routinely spent two or three semesters in remedial sequences, using up that federal limit before ever reaching a course that counted toward a degree. Placing you directly into transfer-level work with concurrent support protects that aid eligibility.

What the Numbers Show

In 2017, only 30 percent of first-time math students even started in a transfer-level course. After the first full term of systemwide implementation, the share of students enrolling directly in transfer-level math jumped from 40 percent to 78 percent, and the one-term completion rate rose 17 percentage points to 40 percent.⁵

The gains have held. By fall 2024, 58 percent of first-time math students completed a transfer-level course on their first attempt, 7 percentage points higher than two years earlier. For Statistics and Liberal Arts Math courses, which cover most non-STEM students, the completion rate reached 62 percent.⁵

Calculus results are more nuanced but still positive. In fall 2024, about 11,700 first-time math students (9 percent) started directly in Calculus I, 69 percent more than in fall 2017, and the number completing Calculus I on their first attempt rose 58 percent over the same period.⁵ More students are reaching calculus, and more are passing it. If a counselor or advisor tells you that your high school record makes you a candidate for a remedial course, you can ask for the data the college used to reach that recommendation. Under the law now, they need to have it.

1
California Legislative Information. California Education Code EDC – Section 78213
2
California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office. AB 1705 Implementation Guide
3
California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office. AB 705 Guided and Self Placement Guidance and Adoption Plan Instructions
4
California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office. Equitable Placement, Support and Completion
5
Public Policy Institute of California. Has Universal Access to Transfer-Level Courses Changed Student Outcomes at California Community Colleges?
6
California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office. AB 705 Validation of Credit English as a Second Language Course Sequences
7
Federal Student Aid. School-Determined Requirements