Colleges drop remedial math, students drop math courses
- Joanne Jacobs
- Mar 27
- 2 min read
Starting all students in college-level math was supposed to speed their path to a degree, writes Katherine Mangan in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Instead of starting in no-credit remedial math, poorly prepared students are placed in college-level classes and offered a corequisite "math lab" or extra catch-up class to learn missing skills. But the short cut is not working for many unprepared students, she writes. They end up taking longer because they keep flunking math.
California legislators eliminated nearly all remedial classes in community colleges in 2017, she writes. They hoped it would help students like Nicholas Lujan, who'd been out of school for years. Instead, the former gold miner has spent three-and-a-half years at Mendocino College trying to qualify for transfer to a four-year university, where he hopes to earn an environmental sciences degree. He squeaked through trigonometry, without a lot of help from the instructor, but needed three tries to pass calculus.
Lujan's professor, Leslie Banta, thinks the policy is well-intentioned, but misguided. She belongs to the Faculty Association of California Community Colleges, which is lobbying for "a more gradual on-ramp to college-level math," Mangan writes.
Nearly all STEM majors are supposed to start with calculus. Mendocino College still offers trigonometry, but that option will end in 2027. Banta says students are being scared away from STEM.
Mendocino's corequisite calculus course meets seven hours a week. It's exhausting, says Banta. Students "were so overwhelmed with the information — all of it new — not building on something they already knew."
Starting at the college level helps some students, instructors say, but others are more likely to fail and drop out. They worry about "pressure to relax standards," Mangan writes.
California is setting students up to fail, writes Richard Ford, an emeritus professor math and statistics, in EdSource. The Community College Chancellor's Office policy calls for all STEM majors to be enrolled directly in calculus, if they have at least a 15 percent chance of passing. "Virtually all educators and administrators consider calculus failure rates in excess of 30% worrisome," he writes.
Ford has little faith that "supports" will be enough for students who never mastered advanced algebra, trigonometry or pre-calculus.
Most community college students who start in remedial classes do not succeed. Many drop out. Starting almost-prepared students at the college level -- with a math lab -- makes sense. But a lot of students are very far from being able to pass trig, much less calculus. Their problem is that they didn't learn very much math in K-12.
You're on to something. It's because the remedial courses are being taught with the expectation that the student is being set up for success in Calculus with zero regard to any deficiencies in their knowledge base. IF <--- your goal is to make sure that students succeed IN calculus, then they might be doing remedial math correctly. This has allowed 2-3% of remedial students to make it to Calculus at the C.C. I work at. Don't have numbers if they actually passed. If you believe that the first goal is not to get these students ready for Calculus, but to remedy deficiencies..... Stay tuned, I'm working on it. Currently going back for a second graduate degree, once I ge…
First of all, how about do not admit students who are unqualified to do the work. Can't do math? Can't read at college level? You've got no business in college.
Also, from the post... "Banta says students are being scared away from STEM." Good. We don't need bridges designed by people who can't do math. See the "pretty bridge" in Florida.
With all the math resources available on the internet now, a lot of them for free, I don’t know why these colleges don’t set up self paced math skills courses with on line tests to get people up to speed. If you can’t pass with these resources, You probably shouldn’t be in college.
If it takes you three tries to pass calculus, perhaps you don't have what it takes to get a degree in engineering, or you should do a little preparation first. I went back to school after twenty years to get a teaching certificate. Had to take a Geometry class. Had no idea what was going on because it had been 25 years since my last and only Geometry class (grade 9). Went home, got a book (Geometry for Dummies), and read it. Passed the class just fine. Where is the expectation that people will get themselves ready before they sign up for advanced classes?
This is ... stunning. Who could possibly have predicted that this would fail abysmally? California legislators and Galactic Math Hyper-Sorceress Jo Boaler got it wrong? Say it ain't so!