Pamela Burdman

Pamela Burdman
November five, 2015

Mathematics plays a central office in winnowing opportunities for students to enter and succeed in college. In California, students can graduate from high school with just two years of math, including a single college-preparatory class, Algebra 1. But if they don't also complete Geometry and Algebra 2 (or, with the introduction of the Common Core state standards, an integrated pattern of courses covering the same material), students aren't eligible to attend either of the state's public academy systems.

Last month, Governor Jerry Brown took an of import pace toward insuring more than students the risk to have those courses: He signed a bill, SB-359, requiring school districts to adopt "off-white, objective, and transparent" policies for determining how to place students into math courses when they start high school. The new policy means that students can't arbitrarily be directed off the college math-fix track. This is proficient news for ensuring that more students, including more underrepresented minorities, acquire the foundational math skills they demand before college.

Merely bad news awaits besides many students at the college gateway. That's because taking the correct courses in high school doesn't guarantee admission to higher-level math courses at the state's colleges and universities. To varying degrees, all three college pedagogy systems in California utilize placement tests to determine whether students are gear up for required college-level math courses. Those who aren't – including upwardly to 85 percent of customs higher students and 33 percent of students at California State University – must take one or more remedial courses.

The problem is that the placement tests used by most campuses have express efficacy for placing students. Inquiry in California and nationally demonstrates that, using traditional placement tests, upwards to a quarter of community higher students are under-placed, required to have remedial math courses even though they could have succeeded in a college-level course. While the tests were originally intended to ensure students were prepared for college-level courses, new bear witness demonstrates that remedial math courses don't improve students' outcomes in higher, and may even worsen them. The majority of community college students assigned to remedial math courses never make it to college-level courses, not because they fail, only considering they exit the remedial sequence.

In writing my contempo report, "Degrees of Freedom: Probing Placement Policies at California Colleges and Universities," I interviewed several students who felt that remedial math placements deterred their progress in college. A student at Berkeley Metropolis College told me she had passed Pre-Calculus in her senior year of high school, but a math test score required her to repeat three courses: Pre-Algebra, Simple Algebra and Intermediate Algebra. Some other, at City College of San Francisco, was assigned to accept four remedial courses, starting with Arithmetic, even though she had taken Trigonometry in high school.

Each year, tens of thousands of students like them may exist prevented from taking required math courses that they could likely pass. They are tripped upwards past placement tests, even though enquiry repeatedly shows that high school records are more accurate predictors of students' college performance.

The problem may be that standardized tests in full general disadvantage some students. A contempo study on the SAT indicates that race and ethnicity are the unmarried largest determinant of California students' scores on that test. Information technology too constitute that faux negatives (examination scores that underrate a student'south actual abilities) were nearly likely to touch on underrepresented minority students. It is like shooting fish in a barrel to imagine that a similar pattern prevails for normally used higher placement tests, since those tests were developed by the same companies that produce the SAT and ACT. That concern is exacerbated past the knowledge that black and Latino community college students are more likely to underestimate their own math abilities, as described in a newspaper by researchers at USC. That tendency decreases the chances that students will claiming a low placement.

Earlier this twelvemonth, Deed admitted the limited predictive validity of its Compass placement examination, and decided to discard it. Recently, CSU system officials acknowledged that a 2010 study past ETS doesn't satisfy questions near the validity of the arrangement's math placement test. They have called for a new analysis that may help ensure that students aren't sent to remedial math courses unnecessarily.

Fortunately, the state's college education systems have begun to develop means to mitigate the problem of inaccurate placement, even in the absence of legislation:

  • With country funding, a grouping of community colleges are piloting new "multiple measures" algorithms for placement that incorporates students' loftier school records. The initiative builds on the work of Long Beach City College, which managed to triple the proportion of students placing into college-level math courses without a drop in students' success in math. Dozens of colleges around the state are jumping on board, even though the pilot isn't finished. For most, the biggest claiming is getting students' high school transcript data in a timely mode in guild to place them in the right course in college.
  • California State Academy has supported the development of high school senior-year math courses for students who are predicted to need remedial math in higher. Early results from courses being offered in the Sacramento area and Los Angeles advise this approach has promise. Success in such courses allows students to waive placement testing at CSU or even earn higher math credit.

These efforts represent good initial steps. But they need to be refined and expanded to ensure that math placement policies don't derail students' chances to succeed in one case they get to higher. Math placement policies deserve far more than scrutiny, given their outsized impact on students' college and career trajectories.

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Pamela Burdman is a Berkeley-based higher educational activity policy analyst and a former program officer at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

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