Many students enter higher education with poor preparation for college mathematics courses. These students are often placed through high-stakes placement testing into developmental coursework that bear no credit towards graduation, but many students who begin in developmental coursework never succeed in a college-level mathematics course. Recent quantitative scholarship estimating the impacts of developmental placement and coursework on performance in gatekeeper courses and graduation has cast doubt on the effectiveness of common remediation practices. Such scholarship has prompted major ongoing reform efforts across the nation. This article highlights some of these findings, while exploring the assumptions of such research and the implications these assumptions have on how to interpret this scholarship.