College Math Test: Does 2+2=4?
Don’t ask a college student in the state of California. More and more college students are taking remedial math.
College math classes are looking more and more like elementary and high school ones.
For example, at Sierra College in California, 34 percent of the math classes are arithmetic, pre-algebra or beginning algebra. Just five years ago, the percentage of remedial math classes at Sierra was 28 percent.
Last year at Cosumnes River College in California 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 strange thing is that students are required to pass algebra in order to pass high school.
So what gives?
I don’t think it’s just the California sun frying student brains.
High school teachers may have had to dumb down their curriculum to make sure students pass. But this get out of jail free card (or school should we say) catches up in the end. Students can’t take more advanced math class in college until they know the basics. And that prevents students from majoring in areas like business, engineering and economics—which could result in not having enough students to fulfil these positions in the workplace.
The nation has to focus on the importance of education if we want to produce the Bill Gates and Steve Jobbs’ of the future. So maybe the first step is not skimping out on the basic building blocks, like 2 + 2= 4.
This entry was posted on Friday, May 16th, 2008 at 12:47 pm and is filed under In the News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
