Georgia awards a HOPE scholarship to high school graduates with a B average or higher. About 12 percent of these A and B students have to take at least one remedial class as freshmen, typically in math. At Macon State, half of HOPE students take a remedial class.
Georgia now requires all students to take college-prep classes in high school; the lower “career” track has been eliminated. I suspect that will pressure teachers to lower expectations and inflate grades.
As long as the responsibility for educating can be pushed on the colleges there’s not much reason for the K-12 schools to live up to their responsibilities.
Even back in the days when I was in college, before the days of current grade inflation, I knew quite a few students who did well in most classes except for math classes. I was a science major who wound up in an English major level class one time in order to meet general graduation requirements because the class fit the best in my packed schedule. (I did very well by the way.)
I hate to pick on English majors, but I remember how shocked I was to learn that there were several English majors in that class alone that were in remedial math classes. Worse, they were complaining bitterly that since they were there to study literature, they did not think they needed to learn math. There was a strong hatred toward math among many of the English majors. They were for the most part, very bright students in everything but math.
I suspect that a hatred of math has more to do with the problem than actual ability to learn math.
My history majors tend to hate math too. What intrigues me is how often I see widely disparate ACT scores, with as many as 17 points separating the English from the math scores (32 English, 15 Math); that’s an anomoly, but 10-point gaps are common. Even for those whose math ACT was OK (say 23 or 24), the majority despise math, and can’t wait to be done with it.
English Majors Don’t Need Maths.
I failed my matriculation maths exam. I probably had a poor maths teacher when I was in infants school in Australia, but I admit I didn’t have a mind for mathematics nor any real interest in it. I loved English , though, and found it easy, even the grammar.
Last week I turned 54. My generation in Oz were taught to “parse” a sentence. That is , to grammatically label every word and then to explain what wss the subject and object, including whether or not the verb was transitive or intransitive. I make no politically correct
apology for what some trendies might see as a terribly obsessive
syllabus ( UK spelling, folks) always focussing on accuracy.
That’s just how the world was then. A fact was a fact. A noun was either a common one or an abstract one or a proper one.
Proper nouns, like The Sydney Harbour Bridge are unique things and so even the definite article “The …” required a capital letter. But my English teachers all had a coherent logic for explaining WHY things were as they were in English. For example, they would tell me there is only one Sydney Harbour Bridge and when we speak of it we say “The”
meaning, it’s the only one. So, it’s quite sensible, logical yes, to make the definite article part of the whole proper noun. Why? Simply because there’s only ONE Sydney Harbour Bridge . So it’s The
Syddney Harbour Bridge. Obsessive? Not really. You see, some less exact
languages than English actually prefer English in their courts because it is more precise than their native language. Hong Kong is one example. Leaving aside the obvious counter argument that “Well, why wouldn’t they. They were a British colony for about 150 years.” True, but Cantonese is actually less exact in certain aspecta and so when cases required absolute clarity, say in terms of time relationships, the magistrate, whether Chinese or British, would ask for that section of the brief to be detailed in English, for purposes of precision.
English and German engineering text books are preferred
by many Asian universities for the same reasons I have mentioned regarding law. I am lousey at maths. Pretty good in English. No English major should be required to study maths. A grounding in philosophy ( classical, not what is illogically called political science) would round off their skills, as well as a sub major in history. That is , if objective historical analysis is offered, rather than the shameless relativism that passes for history courses in many
universities now. Another word for this type of French existentialist gainsaying would be sophistry,Satre, Derrida, et al.
It’s precision in communication that is most essential in all professions as in everyday life. Probably it should be the other way round, maths majors should do a basic course in English. Come to think of it, Greek and Latin would help them as well.
Many perfectly intelligent people hate/fear math because from start to finish (but especially once the curriculum is past the basic arithmetic algorithms) it is taught as a competition and a “race to the finish.” It is treated as weeding out process that is meant to make all but the best fall to the wayside. Teachers who are rigid and not very personable add to the problem. There is no option for taking the same curriculum somewhat slower, so that more people can get to the end of the road.
My experience is now 30 years in the past, but I’m still amazed that, after dropping math after College Algebra/Trig in total exhaustion and defeat (I thought), then not taking math for five years, I scored a 760 on the Math section of the GRE. So I’m not stupid in Math. Who knew? it certainly felt as if I was stupid, all along.
“No English major should be required to study maths.”
The college is not requiring English majors to take something difficult, like Calculus.
The article doesn’t make this clear, but in the US a remedial college math class is usually teaching algebra. Algebra is (as nearly as I can tell) usually taught in 7th grade in the rest of the world (9th grade in the US … occasionally 8th grade).
So the math that these kids are being required to learn in college is something that they should have learned in their first year of high school. In the rest of the word they would have been expected to have learned this by about the time that they were 12 or 13.
I think part of the problem here is that some colleges are kinda embarrassed at the notion that they might hand out degrees to people who can’t do much with math other than count on their fingers.
“Probably it should be the other way round, maths majors should do a basic course in English.”
We do that, too
Often 2 English courses are required unless one tests out of them. Remedial English (also offered) covers things one should have learned in high school. Things like subject-verb agreement, and trying to have a subject for each sentence. And how to construct a paragraph with both a topic sentence and supporting sentences to make a point.
What I want to know is why public universities in the US *accept* these kids in the first place. I’d suggest that requiring remedial courses in high school math and English should probably be evidence that the kid doesn’t belong at the university (yet … I’m fine with them repairing the deficiency and then trying again). I am, however, a small minority in this belief.
-Mark Roulo
I hated and am still terrified of higher level math. Until a few years ago I had a reoccuring nightmare were I almost was done with college then was told at the last minute I needed a calculus course. The terror woke me up.
Too many kids are getting a high school diploma as opposed to a high school education. If you want to know the difference between the two, ask a public high school English or Math teacher. These “basic skills” educators, along with other disciplines, are forced to dumb down their lessons to accomodate learning disabled or ADD, ADHD, ODD or any other darnDD students.
If you live in a rural community, its a reasonable assumption that your talented and gifted child is sharing a classroom with a kid who, by law, must be offered accomodations to “level the playing field” in order to leave no child behind. You have no alternative school, public or private, to send your child. The law never directs anyone to increase standards of education; only to lower them to make sure we insure that no one ever feels embarassed by not being able to identify Portugal on a map or apply the Pythagorean Theorem.
The diploma from my high school does not distinguish the Valedictorian from the accomodated student who can’t read his own graduation program. Thank goodness colleges and universities have standards.
Yep, the new only “college prep” level classes will make the problem worse.
The issue as I presently see it is that the classroom teachers face negative professional consequences for having kids fail their classes, pretty much no matter how little the kids put into passing the class, but absolutely nothing ensures that kids don’t get higher grades than they earn.
Schools also implement policies like no teacher can give a student a zero, even for work that was never completed. So if the lowest grade a student can receive for any assignment is a 50 percent, which seems to be what’s expected in the don’t-give-zeros-schools, earning an 80 really doesn’t require much work or really indicate anything like competency. This is particularly true when teachers try to offer completions grades on some assignments to encourage students to attempt work, even if they aren’t ready to actually get all the problems right.
I think the colleges are kind of fibbing to the public about the problem being with the high schools, though. Most in-state colleges accept enough students from a certain set of public high schools that they know that a student with only an 80 in a class is likely to be woefully under-qualified. And yet, they accept the kids knowing they will have to enroll in remedial classes because the college knows that student will be able to use the HOPE grant for at least the first couple of semesters.
There’s actually no danger that the college ever believed the student was college ready. The SAT scores also tell the same tale.
And only a willfully delusional parent and student would think that an overall 80 average or 3.0 average in high school was a good average when they also know that it places them in the bottom quartile of class rank as it does at many schools. There’s no bell curve with a C at average anymore in Georgia.
Let’s see…the problem with math starts with the training for third grade math teachers — there is none!
Second on colleges and remedial classes — give me a break! Why would they blame the high schools? There is too much money to be made having kids take remedial classes. Some colleges do NOT count those classes towards the college graduation. Hmmmm….Yep, follow the money
These students have not mastered the American middle school math curriculum. They would be unable to figure out how much fertilizer to buy for their lawn because they could not compute the area of the lawn and if they could they would be unable to solve the proportion problem.
Many of their math problems arise because of poor reading and language skills. So they will have difficulty graduating in any major.
In other countries these students would not have an opportunity for a university education. All but a handful drop out or get worthless degrees in some major that has low standards.
Students taking remedial work could be prepared for college by high schools, which have both the staff and the facilities in place to offer evening courses. This is handled by the universities because these students bring in federal and state dollars.
You may be right about the effects of this change - but it doesn’t have to be that way. There are plenty of examples of schools that have put all students in college prep classes and maintained or even elevated standards.
One school in upstate NY went this route, and found that more kids ended up in their IB program, their IB scores - even the top scores - were higher, and their higher scoring IB students had correlating growth in PSAT scores, (just as an extra data point).
I teach a heterogeneous tenth grade English class which students can select after being in a tracked ninth grade class. My school has mostly students with high SES and a huge majority are college bound. The former “lower track” students aren’t expected to read and write as much in other classes at my school, but they’ll do it in my class because it’s expected and because most of their peers are doing it.
And lest you think it can only be done in wealthy suburbs, look up Joan Cone of El Cerrito HS, and View Park Prep in South Central L.A.
“What intrigues me is how often I see widely disparate ACT scores, with as many as 17 points separating the English from the math scores (32 English, 15 Math); that’s an anomoly, but 10-point gaps are common. ”
That’s simply untrue. Here are the only major gaps that occur, in my experience:
1) Major gaps in reading and science scores, because the kids didn’t understand the ruthless time constraints.
2) Huge gaps in Asian kid scores, particularly those who speak next to no English.
English-Math gaps of the type you describe are almost nonexistent, in my experience.
Any student who has high English scores almost certainly has math scores high enough to get out of remedial work. However, there are kids (usually girls) who didn’t do well on the placement test because they forgot to review trig, and thus are stuck in Algebra (as mentioned above) instead of precalc. It’s pretty rare, though.
Quoth Peter Coghill:
What is mathematics, except an extremely concise system of communication? What is it, except a code so universal that mathematicians who share no spoken language can have fun exchanging ideas?
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense. If you look at any of thousands of policy failures in government, you’ll find that people who “don’t need maths” were at the bottom of the mistakes responsible.
And lest I be described as humorless:
∫dCabin/Cabin = log(Cabin)+C = Houseboat