Colleges drop remedial math, students drop math courses

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.