California community college students who plan to study a STEM field will be placed in calculus classes, ready or not, report Amy DiPierro and Michael Burke for EdSource. A new state law requires STEM students to start in calculus rather than precalculus, trigonometry or remedial math, regardless of what courses they passed in high school or their math scores.
Students who take remedial math or other prerequisites usually don't make it to calculus, research shows. So the law requires colleges to start everyone in calculus, and provide remedial help for less-prepared students, such as a skills course or a math lab.
Black, Latino and lower-income students are overrepresented in community colleges’ remedial courses in reading, writing and math. Another law lets most skip remediation. But the calculus law goes farther by making it hard for students who want prep courses to get them.
Community colleges will need approval from the chancellor's office to offer prep classes, and enrollment will be limited to students with a high school GPA of 2.6 or less, or those who did not pass high school trigonometry, precalculus or calculus with at least a C. Colleges must show a student is “highly unlikely to succeed” in calculus without the prep course. Rather than jump through all those hoops, many colleges will drop prep classes and let students fail calculus and give up on STEM plans, math instructors warn.
At Cuyamaca College, an early adopter, students students who hadn't taken precalculus were twice as likely to pass calculus as those who took a precalculus course first, according to the California Acceleration Project. The first group also took a two-unit support course and were offered tutoring.
However, at Southwestern College, less than 5 percent of students who hadn't taken precalculus passed calculus, with a support course and tutoring, say math professors Kimberly Eclar and Karen Cliffe.
Colleges "are experimenting with technology (like guiding students on how to use AI or using homework software that gauges students’ math skills as they answer questions) and different approaches to testing (like allowing students to retake tests or to choose which questions to answer)," writes Barshay. "Others said they’re aiming to create smaller class sizes, use embedded tutors and tailor calculus courses to meet the needs of life sciences students."
Update: The state chancellor's office has decided community colleges can offer two semesters of prep courses to students who didn't pass trigonometry in high school but want to pursue STEM majors.
This legislation wastes money: international agreements exist (the Global Convention on the Recognition of Qualifications Concerning Higher Education, for degrees in general, and the Washington, Sydney, and Dublin accords, for accrediting boards of engineers' technology) that set the relevant mathematical standards (ABET illustrates its definition of "college-level mathematics" to "include calculus, differential equations, probability, statistics, linear algebra, and discrete mathematics"), and ignorant, term-limited legislatures that ignore these risk producing yet more students with inflated, expensive degrees who cannot find professional employment and cannot repay their student loans, driving the rest of us into still greater debt when lawless administrations like Biden-Harris try to transfer their welchers' mistakes onto the rest of us.
Back in 1981, a computer science degree required the person majoring to take and PASS the following courses:
Calc I/II, Linear Algebra, Applied Stats, Diff Eqns I/II, Abstract Algebra, and Numerical Analysis
Engineering Physics I/II
9 Credit Hours in Upper Division Science
Digital Logic I/II
9 Credit Hours in Philosophy (including symbolic logic)
Many students who are un-prepared will be either changing majors or dropping out
by the end of the first year of college (or flunking out), IMO
There is a third option: alter the courses themselves as well as the grading, to ensure the pass-rate will be acceptable.