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> The course "College Algebra" has the highest fail rate among all university courses in the US After I finished my undergraduate education, I moved to a diffe
by octorian 8y ago
> The course "College Algebra" has the highest fail rate among all university courses in the US
After I finished my undergraduate education, I moved to a different area and started to hang out around people who were attending the local state University. Often, they would say "I'm bad at math" and "I struggled with College Algebra" in the same sentence/context.
My initial reaction was a dumbfounded "Algebra is a college subject? I didn't know that. I thought it was a high school subject, sometimes started in middle school."
Of course I didn't do my undergraduate education at a state University. I went to a more engineering-focused school, where the lowest math class in the entire course catalog was a dumbed down variant of Calculus for non-engineering majors.
- mcguire 8y agoOnce upon a time, there was a student who went to a middling poor school in a middling-poor school district. The highest math class he took before graduating was algebra. He proceeded to test out of geometry and trig, getting dumped into calc his first semester in college. He did not do well.
- throwawayjava 8y agoI don't think anyone is arguing that K12 education in the US is perfect. The argument is that using expensive colleges/universities to fill course-length gaps in K12 education is a poor use of resources. Society should not pay PhD-trained analysts or algebraists to teach FOIL...