Posted on 02/29/2012 5:45:59 AM PST by reaganaut1
Two new studies from the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College have found that community colleges unnecessarily place tens of thousands of entering students in remedial classes — and that their placement decisions would be just as good if they relied on high school grade-point averages instead of standardized placement tests.
The studies address one of the most intractable problems of higher education: the dead end of remedial education. At most community colleges, a majority of entering students who recently graduated from high school are placed in remedial classes, where they pay tuition but earn no college credit. Over all, less than a quarter of those who start in remedial classes go on to earn two-year degrees or transfer to four-year colleges.
The studies, one of a large urban community college system and the other of a statewide system, found that more than a quarter of the students assigned to remedial classes based on their test scores could have passed college-level courses with a grade of B or higher.
“We hear a lot about the high rates of failure in college-level classes at community colleges,” said Judith Scott-Clayton, the author of the urban study and a Teachers College professor of economics and education and senior research associate. “Those are very visible. What’s harder to see are the students who could have done well at college level but never got the chance because of these placement tests.”
The colleges’ use of the leading placement tests — the College Board’s Accuplacer and ACT’s Compass — lead to mistakes in both directions, the studies find, but students going into college-level classes they cannot handle is not as serious as unnecessary remedial placement, which often derails college careers.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Over here are 1992 SAT scores broken down by race and sex. Number of white males scoring 700 or above on math SAT: 22,388; number of black females scoring 700 or above: 131.
I was in high school in the late 70’s, when basic geometry and algebra 1 and 2 were commonly followed by pre-calculus and then, if you were in an upper-middle-class school with AP-type courses, calculus. Thus, if you were even on a regular college-prep course in an average high school you should have been ready for calculus 1 to start your freshman year of college. No math or science major credit would be awarded for anything less than that.
Since then AP has become much more common, but on the lower end, endless terms of “college algebra” (which are no such thing and should make one think of linear algebra) seem to have become the norm.
A math major (associate degree program) at my local community college would start at calculus and take a total of 4 semesters of calculus & Analytic Geometry . Anything less, college algebra, trig and or basic statistics will not count towards the major. The prerequsites for calc. are college algebra and trig, if you don’t have them in HS or score high enough on the SAT you start there and turn a 2 year program into a three year program.
The problem in the US is not the colleges, it’s the public school systems, they don’t teach math, they don’t impress onthe students the need to know math, they pass kids that don’t have any math skills. But then there are those kids who for some reason love math. This group would include my two kids and they have shamed me into learning math, which by the way I’m going to be a student of for the rest of my life. Talk about an overreaction!
...and what harm does this do to the community college business model? None whatsoever. In fact, they make pretty good money running those remedial classes, and if a student in them goes on to graduate, that student will have spent more money toward his Associate's degree than he otherwise would have.
This is the bottom line. There's no cash incentive for a school to do it any other way.
Congrats—the kids may have motivated you, but you’re being a great model for them!
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