Timeline for Why do colleges attempt to teach students who lack prerequisite skills?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
6 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Dec 13, 2021 at 18:19 | comment | added | Daniel R. Collins | Really? Because where I am in CUNY, we always had a 3-semester sequence of remedial math. (Prealgebra, elementary algebra, intermediate algebra.) I thought that was customary, e.g. looking at text offerings like OpenStax. Are you saying other colleges offer 6 semesters of remediation, or something else? | |
| Dec 12, 2021 at 17:38 | comment | added | Dimitri Vulis | CUNY community colleges, thanks to almost-open admissions, get lots of incoming students who can't add fractions. However other more "prestigious / exclusive" universities also get, e.g. 18 year old athletes on sports scholarships and also returning students much older than 18 who haven't been to classroom in many years - working / armed forces / incarcerated. In my opnion, many other schools serve such students better in various ways, and in particular, their versions of remedial math usually takes 2 semesters to cover the material what CUNY crammed into 1. | |
| Dec 12, 2021 at 14:58 | comment | added | Daniel R. Collins | I can respect your observations on that. IME the number of people who knew it years ago is vanishingly small (no more than 10%). I'd say a larger cohort in my remedial classes (at least half) have severe intellectual disabilities in math, who can't retain even the simplest arithmetic facts no matter how long it was practiced. | |
| Dec 12, 2021 at 2:31 | comment | added | Dimitri Vulis | Thanks for the update! I should note that the system worked better at other universities than at CUNY becasuse at CUNY remedial math classes had two types of people: 1 those who never learned how to add fractions in secondary school, and 2 people who did years ago, but forgot, or did not do well on the placement test for whateeve reason. The course covered way too much material too fats for the first type, so almost all of them failed repeatedly. The second type did well, but were angry that they had to take remedial class they did not really need. | |
| Dec 11, 2021 at 16:55 | comment | added | Daniel R. Collins | Note that the current trend in U.S. academia is to eliminate the existence of placement tests and remedial courses. At my institution (community college within CUNY) , I just finished the last such class I'll ever teach, as they won't be offered any more. | |
| Dec 9, 2021 at 4:56 | history | answered | Dimitri Vulis | CC BY-SA 4.0 |