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….
No English major should be required to study maths….
It’s precision in communication that is most essential in all professions as in everyday life.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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