10 ms·

>The implicit message here seems to be, "let everyone pass through the system regardless of how qualified they actually are, but we'll have to lower the bar to

>The implicit message here seems to be, "let everyone pass through the system regardless of how qualified they actually are, but we'll have to lower the bar to keep grades and graduation rates high." No. You are completely missing the point here. Graduation requirements have not changed. Students still have to pass the same amount of classes. What this will do is allow students to have a shot at taking actual credit courses rather than being forced into noncredit remedial classes they may not actually need. Remedial courses put an undue financial and time burden on students who would be better served with a bit of motivation and support to get through actual 101 level courses.

vostok 9y ago
Is there a real issue here? First of all, isn't failing the placement test prima facie evidence that you need remedial courses? Second, at least my school generally gave you enough rope to hang yourself if you wanted to. You want to take arguably the hardest undergraduate math class in the US? Well go ahead...
- cbhl 9y ago
  > First of all, isn't failing the placement test prima facie evidence that you need remedial courses? No. An anecdote: In my tenth grade science class, they had a quiz where you have to memorize the name, atomic number, and atomic size of the first 20 elements of the periodic table. You then fill in the blanks on a table with each of these fields in the columns, and some elements in the rows. I passed this test. In the first week of my eleventh grade chemistry class, we were presented with the same quiz. I knew I had previously passed this test, so I didn't study for it -- and got an F (~40%, IIRC). My Chemistry teacher -- concerned about my poor performance on this "placement pre-test", asked if I was sure I wanted to take his course. I replied yes, and went on to be the second or third highest mark in the class (an A). (Of course, then I went into Software Engineering in University, and the lack of labs in our Chemistry courses completely ruined my passion for the subject.)
  - vostok 9y ago
    That's a great point. It's certainly possible to design a bad placement test.
    - PeterisP 9y ago
      It also seems that the now increasingly common format of multiple choice quizzes would be a "railroad" to designing bad placement tests - ones that verify remembering irrelevant details and how things are named/ordered/classified versus ones that verify skills and understanding of core concepts.
      - mamon 9y ago
        Quizzes (both single and multiple choice) are the worst possible way of testing student's knowledge, because they are sooo... easy. Trouble here is that human memory is an associative memory - being given one piece of information helps you recall other, related piece. So when the correct answer is written down just few lines below the question you'll probably be able to identify it, even if your overall recall of the material is very bad. This strongly encourages learn-pass-forget style of learning. To better test student's knowledge you need harder tasks: practical exam, asking to actually apply your knowledge. Or write an essay, which at the very least forces you to put your knowledge in some logical structure. Or the oral exam, where it's evident whether you can have intelligent discussion on the topic or not. The only advantage of quizzes is that they are quick to do, quick to check, and give the teacher illusion of fairness (because there cannot be any debate whether or not answer is correct and complete).
        dom0 9y ago
        > Quizzes (both single and multiple choice) are the worst possible way of testing student's knowledge, because they are sooo... easy. Very much depends. "Name members of X" is an easy question (unless there is a great amount of material that could be covered). "Mark the following statements as correct or incorrect. Correct classification adds, wrong classification deducts points." can be a quite difficult type of checkbox-test.
- wbl 9y ago
  The students taking Sally's class all knew what they were in for and many had been preparing for it for all of high school.
StanislavPetrov 9y ago
No, you are missing the point. For many years now, admissions standards have been so low that rather than teaching the courses they are scheduled to teach, college professors are forced to offer a remedial review of information that should have been mastered in high school. Many, if not most, high school graduates are functionally illiterate, lacking the basic reading and writing skills we took for granted in the recent past. US students ranked 38th out of 71 countries in math, and 28th in science. Kids in Hungary and the Slovak Republic outranked us. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/15/u-s-students-internationally-math-science/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/15/u-s-students... The sad truth is that the university in the USA are just degree mills looking to make the most money possible. They have no problem steadily lowering their standards to match the steady decline in the US educational system as long as the federally-backed student-loans keep rolling in.
- rtpg 9y ago
  I know the US system has its issues relative to other places, but I have never seen research showing that people are in fact worse going out. In fact, I feel like I've seen a study showing that the "new math" teaching methodologies that get parents so mad nowadays end up with kids being better at math...
  - talmand 9y ago
    Funny, my kids' math teachers have all stated to me, in public not whispers, they hate the "new math" and it is inhibiting them from teaching math correctly. Since I wasn't educated in the "new math" as a kid I have difficulties helping my children with their homework, which the teachers also admitted to being a problem. Typically I just show them how to solve the problem the way I learned and they pick it up much quicker. To each their own I suppose.
    - cafard 9y ago
      Does Common Core use what we called "the new math" back in the 1960s? (Tom Lehrer's song is probably as good an intro as any.) Good math teachers seem to be hard to find. That was true in my school days also.
midnitewarrior 9y ago
It matters if they have professors that grade on a curve. Take all of those students who wouldn't pass the math entrance exam and put then in the same College Algebra class. They are all terrible students but the curve grading passes 80% of them. > allow students to have a shot at taking actual credit courses rather than being forced into noncredit remedial classes they may not actually need If the placement tests are done well, they would indicate that which remedial classes the students may need. If the tests are flawed, fix the tests, don't eliminate them. While putting them into 101 classes may help them, it slows down the rest of the class -- the students who are up-to-speed on the skills required for the class get less attention spent on them because more focus must be placed on the students who didn't pass placement.
- matt_wulfeck 9y ago
  > If the tests are flawed, fix the tests, don't eliminate them. The tests are fine and we know it. The students are bad and so are their parents, who were also bad students. Source: I was a bad student who had to change a lot in life. Magically when my attitude towards school changed so did my grades. Teachers can only do so much yet burden almost all of the blame.
  - RonanTheGrey 9y ago
    > Magically when my attitude towards school changed so did my grades. Funny how that works. "Why won't you learn?!" "It doesn't matter to me!" is not a recipe for success. I appreciate what you said. Made me want to jump out of my chair and clap. But then I would have been escorted to the loony bin, so...
- jacalata 9y ago
  Why do you believe that having a test administered by the school is the only way to identify students needing remedial help? The school is arguing that they can do a better job of identification by using existing grades and test scores. What's your evidence against this argument?
0x10101 9y ago
"Graduation requirements have not changed. Students still have to pass the same amount of classes. " This is where you are wrong. Classes such as remedial English or basic mathematics did not used to count for college credit, they now do. Therefore students can graduate with a lower level of performance than was previously possible.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  Incorrect; this is not granting credit for existing remedial courses, it is eliminating the existing set of remedial courses, and the testing and other policies aruoud them, and requiring new models (but not dictating one single model for all campuses.) There area number of alternative remediation models that have been used in other institutions without the problems experienced by the current CSU remedial ed program that campuses may be guided by. This is all expressly laid out in the article.
  - 0x10101 9y ago
    You're right that there is some flexibility, but the basic move is to grant credit for remediation [see below]. Whether that means turning the intro courses into multiple semester courses or giving credit for summer prep. The problems with basing placements on high school grades is why they had to create the assessments in the first place. The better solution is the early assessment program, but since California has eliminated the high school graduation exam requirement, it gets harder to see which college bound student needs help in the 11th/12th grade level. "Freshmen who would usually be directed to developmental English or math will instead enroll in the same general education classes as their peers, but they might receive additional tutoring or take the course at a slower pace, stretched over multiple semesters. A summer program for incoming freshmen who need extra preparation will be redesigned to count for credit." http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article165342632.html http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert...
    - dragonwriter 9y ago
      > but the basic move is to grant credit for remediation [see below]. Your quote does not really support that description; it suggests that they will be directed into either non-remedial for-credit courses with additional tutoring or other support, or courses with the same content (and credit) as non-remedial courses but a stretched timeframe. The former is clearly not credit for remediation (the only “remediation” is outside of the for-credit classwork), the latter arguably could be described that way but the content is not remedial, only the manner of presentation. > since California has eliminated the high school graduation exam requirement, it gets harder to see which college bound student needs help in the 11th/12th grade level. It was suspended through 2018, and there is a recommendation to repeal it, but the exit exam wasn't based on current curriculum standards and the other assessments (including several in eleventh grade) that are aligned with those standards aren't being eliminated. So I don't think it has any bearing on how hard it is to identify students falling behind.
maxlybbert 9y ago
On the one hand, I remember my high school math teacher complaining about how colleges even had to offer remedial education (she considered it proof that high schools were generally failing to do their jobs). On the other hand, I personally didn't go straight from high school to college, so I was given a particular placement exam, and when I passed it I was put in college algebra (instead of being allowed to take the next harder placement exam). It was clear to me after about a week that I remembered more math than the school thought I had. Of course, I should have tested out of the class and used the free time to take something that would have been more useful to me. I wish the school had been less rigid about which math class they would allow me to take. But the obvious outcome with this policy change will be that students will have to decide which class to take, and some will get it wrong. Will they be allowed to fail? Will that help double the graduation rate? Will more classes simply include remedial material? If so, is that an improvement?
gozur88 9y ago
The problem is students who should be in remedial courses are going to turn the first year of college into High School Part II for everyone.

vostok 9y ago

Is there a real issue here? First of all, isn't failing the placement test prima facie evidence that you need remedial courses? Second, at least my school generally gave you enough rope to hang yourself if you wanted to. You want to take arguably the hardest undergraduate math class in the US? Well go ahead...

cbhl 9y ago
> First of all, isn't failing the placement test prima facie evidence that you need remedial courses? No. An anecdote: In my tenth grade science class, they had a quiz where you have to memorize the name, atomic number, and atomic size of the first 20 elements of the periodic table. You then fill in the blanks on a table with each of these fields in the columns, and some elements in the rows. I passed this test. In the first week of my eleventh grade chemistry class, we were presented with the same quiz. I knew I had previously passed this test, so I didn't study for it -- and got an F (~40%, IIRC). My Chemistry teacher -- concerned about my poor performance on this "placement pre-test", asked if I was sure I wanted to take his course. I replied yes, and went on to be the second or third highest mark in the class (an A). (Of course, then I went into Software Engineering in University, and the lack of labs in our Chemistry courses completely ruined my passion for the subject.)
- vostok 9y ago
  That's a great point. It's certainly possible to design a bad placement test.
  - PeterisP 9y ago
    It also seems that the now increasingly common format of multiple choice quizzes would be a "railroad" to designing bad placement tests - ones that verify remembering irrelevant details and how things are named/ordered/classified versus ones that verify skills and understanding of core concepts.
    - mamon 9y ago
      Quizzes (both single and multiple choice) are the worst possible way of testing student's knowledge, because they are sooo... easy. Trouble here is that human memory is an associative memory - being given one piece of information helps you recall other, related piece. So when the correct answer is written down just few lines below the question you'll probably be able to identify it, even if your overall recall of the material is very bad. This strongly encourages learn-pass-forget style of learning. To better test student's knowledge you need harder tasks: practical exam, asking to actually apply your knowledge. Or write an essay, which at the very least forces you to put your knowledge in some logical structure. Or the oral exam, where it's evident whether you can have intelligent discussion on the topic or not. The only advantage of quizzes is that they are quick to do, quick to check, and give the teacher illusion of fairness (because there cannot be any debate whether or not answer is correct and complete).
      - dom0 9y ago
        > Quizzes (both single and multiple choice) are the worst possible way of testing student's knowledge, because they are sooo... easy. Very much depends. "Name members of X" is an easy question (unless there is a great amount of material that could be covered). "Mark the following statements as correct or incorrect. Correct classification adds, wrong classification deducts points." can be a quite difficult type of checkbox-test.
wbl 9y ago
The students taking Sally's class all knew what they were in for and many had been preparing for it for all of high school.

StanislavPetrov 9y ago

No, you are missing the point. For many years now, admissions standards have been so low that rather than teaching the courses they are scheduled to teach, college professors are forced to offer a remedial review of information that should have been mastered in high school. Many, if not most, high school graduates are functionally illiterate, lacking the basic reading and writing skills we took for granted in the recent past. US students ranked 38th out of 71 countries in math, and 28th in science. Kids in Hungary and the Slovak Republic outranked us. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/15/u-s-students-internationally-math-science/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/15/u-s-students... The sad truth is that the university in the USA are just degree mills looking to make the most money possible. They have no problem steadily lowering their standards to match the steady decline in the US educational system as long as the federally-backed student-loans keep rolling in.

rtpg 9y ago
I know the US system has its issues relative to other places, but I have never seen research showing that people are in fact worse going out. In fact, I feel like I've seen a study showing that the "new math" teaching methodologies that get parents so mad nowadays end up with kids being better at math...
- talmand 9y ago
  Funny, my kids' math teachers have all stated to me, in public not whispers, they hate the "new math" and it is inhibiting them from teaching math correctly. Since I wasn't educated in the "new math" as a kid I have difficulties helping my children with their homework, which the teachers also admitted to being a problem. Typically I just show them how to solve the problem the way I learned and they pick it up much quicker. To each their own I suppose.
  - cafard 9y ago
    Does Common Core use what we called "the new math" back in the 1960s? (Tom Lehrer's song is probably as good an intro as any.) Good math teachers seem to be hard to find. That was true in my school days also.

midnitewarrior 9y ago

It matters if they have professors that grade on a curve. Take all of those students who wouldn't pass the math entrance exam and put then in the same College Algebra class. They are all terrible students but the curve grading passes 80% of them. > allow students to have a shot at taking actual credit courses rather than being forced into noncredit remedial classes they may not actually need If the placement tests are done well, they would indicate that which remedial classes the students may need. If the tests are flawed, fix the tests, don't eliminate them. While putting them into 101 classes may help them, it slows down the rest of the class -- the students who are up-to-speed on the skills required for the class get less attention spent on them because more focus must be placed on the students who didn't pass placement.

matt_wulfeck 9y ago
> If the tests are flawed, fix the tests, don't eliminate them. The tests are fine and we know it. The students are bad and so are their parents, who were also bad students. Source: I was a bad student who had to change a lot in life. Magically when my attitude towards school changed so did my grades. Teachers can only do so much yet burden almost all of the blame.
- RonanTheGrey 9y ago
  > Magically when my attitude towards school changed so did my grades. Funny how that works. "Why won't you learn?!" "It doesn't matter to me!" is not a recipe for success. I appreciate what you said. Made me want to jump out of my chair and clap. But then I would have been escorted to the loony bin, so...
jacalata 9y ago
Why do you believe that having a test administered by the school is the only way to identify students needing remedial help? The school is arguing that they can do a better job of identification by using existing grades and test scores. What's your evidence against this argument?

0x10101 9y ago

"Graduation requirements have not changed. Students still have to pass the same amount of classes. " This is where you are wrong. Classes such as remedial English or basic mathematics did not used to count for college credit, they now do. Therefore students can graduate with a lower level of performance than was previously possible.

dragonwriter 9y ago
Incorrect; this is not granting credit for existing remedial courses, it is eliminating the existing set of remedial courses, and the testing and other policies aruoud them, and requiring new models (but not dictating one single model for all campuses.) There area number of alternative remediation models that have been used in other institutions without the problems experienced by the current CSU remedial ed program that campuses may be guided by. This is all expressly laid out in the article.
- 0x10101 9y ago
  You're right that there is some flexibility, but the basic move is to grant credit for remediation [see below]. Whether that means turning the intro courses into multiple semester courses or giving credit for summer prep. The problems with basing placements on high school grades is why they had to create the assessments in the first place. The better solution is the early assessment program, but since California has eliminated the high school graduation exam requirement, it gets harder to see which college bound student needs help in the 11th/12th grade level. "Freshmen who would usually be directed to developmental English or math will instead enroll in the same general education classes as their peers, but they might receive additional tutoring or take the course at a slower pace, stretched over multiple semesters. A summer program for incoming freshmen who need extra preparation will be redesigned to count for credit." http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article165342632.html http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert...
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    > but the basic move is to grant credit for remediation [see below]. Your quote does not really support that description; it suggests that they will be directed into either non-remedial for-credit courses with additional tutoring or other support, or courses with the same content (and credit) as non-remedial courses but a stretched timeframe. The former is clearly not credit for remediation (the only “remediation” is outside of the for-credit classwork), the latter arguably could be described that way but the content is not remedial, only the manner of presentation. > since California has eliminated the high school graduation exam requirement, it gets harder to see which college bound student needs help in the 11th/12th grade level. It was suspended through 2018, and there is a recommendation to repeal it, but the exit exam wasn't based on current curriculum standards and the other assessments (including several in eleventh grade) that are aligned with those standards aren't being eliminated. So I don't think it has any bearing on how hard it is to identify students falling behind.

maxlybbert 9y ago

On the one hand, I remember my high school math teacher complaining about how colleges even had to offer remedial education (she considered it proof that high schools were generally failing to do their jobs). On the other hand, I personally didn't go straight from high school to college, so I was given a particular placement exam, and when I passed it I was put in college algebra (instead of being allowed to take the next harder placement exam). It was clear to me after about a week that I remembered more math than the school thought I had. Of course, I should have tested out of the class and used the free time to take something that would have been more useful to me. I wish the school had been less rigid about which math class they would allow me to take. But the obvious outcome with this policy change will be that students will have to decide which class to take, and some will get it wrong. Will they be allowed to fail? Will that help double the graduation rate? Will more classes simply include remedial material? If so, is that an improvement?

gozur88 9y ago

The problem is students who should be in remedial courses are going to turn the first year of college into High School Part II for everyone.