Five years ago, California required all students to pass algebra to earn a high school diploma. Yet students are flooding remedial math classes in community college, reports the Sacramento Bee. They can’t do algebra. They can’t even do arithmetic.
At Sierra College in Rocklin, for example, of the 199 sections of math being taught this year, 68 of them – 34 percent – are arithmetic, pre-algebra or beginning algebra. Most students seeking a two-year or four-year degree must master those levels of math and in many cases go beyond.
Five years ago, the percentage of remedial math courses at Sierra was 28 percent.
Last year at Cosumnes River College in Elk Grove, 40.8 percent of incoming students who took a math placement exam tested into arithmetic or pre-algebra, up from 38.1 percent two years earlier.
The story’s anecdotal student, a community college sophomore, wants to transfer to UC-Davis to study environmental science. She’s struggling with basic algebra, a course she passed with a C in high school. How she’s going to learn science if she can’t do basic math?
Requiring all students to pass algebra may have a perverse effect: Teachers feel pressured to lower standards so unprepared students — the kids who didn’t learn arithmetic in elementary school — will move on. The math section of the state graduation exam can be passed with a 55 percent; random guessing would yield a 25 percent. And, still, many students have to take it again and again.
Why would you link high school requirements to college performance? Where is it written that a high school diploma is proof of college readiness?
The solution, obviously, is to raise college standards rather than allow all high school graduates to go to college.
Regardless, your title is misleading. It’s not that “college students are stumped” by that simple algebra problem, but that colleges, either by choice or legal requirement, accept students who don’t know algebra.
But it’s much more dramatic, I suppose, to imply that college students routinely profess ignorance of algebra.
There are a couple factors at work here.
Yes, some teachers water down the material so their students don’t fail. And some high schools won’t teach any math lower than Algebra 1, even if that’s what the students need, under the guise of “higher standards”.
And some students don’t take the Entry Level Math test seriously. Many haven’t really been held to any standard before; why should they expect any different when the go to a university?
Darren -
You do make a good point regarding taking tests seriously. One of the biggest challenges that I have had this year is to get my students to treat tests, well, as tests and not simply as a nuisance.
I have literally forced students to answer a question in front of me and then asked them to explain their reasoning to ensure that they understood the material. Later, on the test, I’ve given them the same exact question (word-for-word) and gotten wrong answers. When I’ve asked them afterwards why they would mark an incorrect answer when they did know the correct answer, they’ve responded that they didn’t care or were in a hurry. Of course, they then act surprised that I didn’t offer them a test retake, corrections to raise their score, or the opportunity to drop their lowest test grade.
Some students care so little for educational success that they won’t even bother to use the material that they DO know.
I encountered another explanation today, as my pre-calculus students were working on inductive proofs.
I teach them to SHOW the formula you’re proving works for n=1, ASSUME it works for n=k, and PROVE it works for n=k+1. When students get down to the proving part, there can be lots of algebra to work through. Here I have this class of very bright pre-calculus (trig and math analysis) students, and I can’t tell you how many were asking questions about what to do next. They didn’t see the algebra right in front of them. I could tell them and *then* they’d see and know how to do it, but they couldn’t see what to do without my initial nudge.
It’s almost like they’ve compartmentalized their knowledge. “Oh, we’re not working on getting a common denominator, so I didn’t think to get a common denominator when adding these two rational expressions.” As soon as I said “common denominator”, though, they knew right what to do.
It’s very frustrating.