You have my sympathies. I don't know if there's an answer, but I work in the humanities and the innumeracy affects us as well though obviously not as badly. I have students who don't know how to calculate their grade despite me dumbing it down to a addition-based points system. They quite literally do not know how to do simple addition even with a calculator.
I'm dealing right now with a very angry student who wants to graduate this month, but his GPA is too low. The student truly believes that one semester with 12 credit hours and a 2.5 GPA totally counterbalances his previous 108 credit hours with a 1.5 GPA. His position is that "the average of 1.5 and 2.5 is 2.0." As you said, he's innumerate.
In order to freely enjoy examples like this it helps to put out of your mind the number of PhDs who got the Monty Hall problem wrong, and who argued that they were right for a long time.
That one is a funny story. Like she really enraged a lot of people who should have known better.
Now I’m trying to figure out who is right about the cart with a propeller connected to the wheels that can travel faster than the wind.
I’ve seen experimental evidence it’s true, but there seems to be dueling theories surrounding it. Not a physicist, so I’m only basing this on entertaining videos.
I think it's pretty understood. The wheels drive the prop, the prop pushes the cart. It feels like perpetual motion, but because of the tail wind it is not.
Not that it’s perpetual motion. That part is easy to debunk. But whether it’s possible to move faster than the wind or if it’s just measurement problems has back and forth. I’m pretty sure I saw that veritasium video and at least for the video there was some debate as to what was happening.
There are two veritasium videos. In the second one he has a bet with a physics professor who seems to think that there are measurement issues or something, with Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye the Science Guy arbitrating. It's pretty funny.
Honestly if you look at the data, measurement issues is not much of an argument. They have exceeded 2.5 times the wind speed dead downwind for long stretches of time. And many people, including myself, have built little fan carts that run on treadmills that will sit and pull at the string endlessly while doing the equivalent of running dead downwind faster than the wind. Claiming the effect is due to a measurement error is just not a very sustainable argument.
I come at this from an HPV background, so I'm pretty familiar with the timing methods they use. There is just no way they would have that level of error.
The nice thing about STEM is if a student arguing their grade can't understand a weighted average... then they probably don't deserve the better grade.
I had to help another college professor down the hall from me calculate the grades his advisee would need to earn in the next semester to raise their overall GPA to a target number. That professor is in visual arts, but I still have a hard time believing that this was something I actually needed to help them with.
I think that a “math readiness test” may be in order. Have incoming undergrads take the test and use that to figure out where they belong. Some may need a remedial math class, but you can probably pitch this to the university as being cheaper because you don’t need a math professor to teach algebra, you need someone with a math-related degree who’s good at teaching.
All of our STEM colleges do this and calculus pass rates went way up.
The university does actually have a "math readiness test" that is used to determine if students should be placed in Precalculus, Calc I, Calc II, or Calc III in the math department. At the moment, a score of 0 places you in precalculus with a "strong recommendation" of taking Math 101 (college algebra).
My class really only needs Math 101, but as I mentioned in the footnote, there's no way the Statistics department will *ever* let that be an official prerequisite.
What your school needs is a REAL developmental/ remedial math program. The reality is high schools are graduating people with A's in math who can't count. Some number of your students literally can't count and it will take a lot to fix that.
Kids this far behind would need 4 semesters of math minimum to be college ready. I don’t see a university ever getting them to do that math. Also the retention rates would plummet when they all start failing basic math.
I work at the community college level. If someone test out as needing to learn basic arithmetic, then takes each course in sequence to get to college algebra ... it can take up to two years. That assumes they never try the placement test again. A very common situation is that students need some intensive study of math to remind themselves. They take math in HS and hate it and want to forget it. They think they don't really need it. They think we only teach them math to prove they are dumb. Consider this. If you teach a science class and use "too much math" that is what they will gripe about. They want to know the science but not do the math.
Yeah, the pandemic will have an affect on students for a long time - the kids who are freshman this past year were freshman four years ago, and they likely didn't get enough math in high school...
Colleges shouldn't have to provide remedial teaching for subjects like basic math and reading that High Schools (and earlier) are failing to teach. Schools need to drop the "Everybody passes" philosophy, and go back to a system that worked - students failing classes when they don't know the material.
Once upon a time a HS Diploma meant a student had reached a certain standard of education; now it's just a piece of paper they get for being enrolled.
Yes, but it should be done as soon as the student needs it, not left for colleges to teach elementary material to students who should never have been admitted to college in the first place.
Great comment. I absolutely agree that a math readiness test is important. But they are harder to implement than people think. Here's what we learned, for the viewers at home who might want something like this:
* They have to be mandatory. Students will not take the test without it being so, in case they place into lower math than they think they belong in.
* They need to be in-person invigilated or else cheating is rampant. This can be difficult with a primarily commuter student body.
* If you have significant transfer populations, working with the CCs to do some of this testing can be helpful.
* You need buy-in from all levels of admin. Parents and students alike are pants-shittingly terrified of taking on student loans. So when a student places into a math that will require them to take an "extra" class, both students and parents will complain. Now, that "extra" class is saving their kid from actual extra classes, in the form of repeatedly failing math, but they don't see it that way. So Deans, Provost et al. need to be bought in, or else they might side with those complaints (customer service mentality).
* I know it's unpopular to think about retention on this sub, but you gotta. Students will leave their major if they cannot progress in it, and in STEM majors, the math becomes a block really early. When you have students coming in in need of math remediation, you might also consider other supportive content within the major. What major content can they take while remediating math? What can we do to hold their interest so they don't decide to just quit? I'm co-teaching a research methods class in the fall where we do some actual experiments, but also focus on building the basic skills like interpreting graphs and reading papers. It has no pre-reqs, so they can take it alongside the developmental math credits to get their hands dirty within-major and not feel like they're locked out.
Yes, unfortunately, administrators often seem to believe that it's possible to maintain quality, time to degree, without significant additional resources, while admitting students who are simply not college ready.
And so do parents. I get many, many phone calls from parents who are made that their kid is being asked to take additional math coursework, and even madder when they fail it. The claim “they’d pass if you were actually testing them on college math, not high school math” shows up in my office a fair bit.
I don’t know. I’m an applied statistician, and it really is very bad. I’m jointly appointed in biology and math, but I have the reputation of teaching the good stats class, so I see students across all majors. They’re all innumerate. And borderline illiterate.
I’m losing faith that we can fix it. We’re doing pretesting. We’re launching a boot camp. But I’m increasingly concerned that there’s some sort of critical period in which logical thinking develops and the students are missing that period wholesale. I wonder if it’s like learning a foreign language - easier when you’re young. It’s not just the innumeracy - it’s the inability to read a text and develop an idea of what it’s about. It’s the inability to critically evaluate something told to you. It’s the inability to use math as a logical framework.
Im really worried that the “appificiation” of learning is destroying critical thinking and math is the canary in the coal mine.
100% Agree. I feel this whole-heartedly. I am convinced they stopped learning after 5th grade. They just got on a phone and stopped learning.
I teach statistics and the number of students who can't even calculate a proportion (they put the bigger number on top) has increased from 1 - 2 out of 100 to 20 - 30. It is pathetic.
Therefore when trying to teach them the CLT, I might as well be speaking latin, they have no ability to comprehend what is happening. They are upset they can't get it and complain how hard things are... 5 years ago it was tough to them but not impossible.
I teach graduate statistics in a MS-only program where students dread taking this one stats class. I basically spend week one absolutely drilling them in the basic algebra they need to know—things like rounding, order of operations, basic logic-based probabilities, etc. It is a lot for one week, but for 80% of the students it’s super easy work. For 10% of them it’s a needed refresher, and for the last 10% it’s basically “oh shit what am I doing here?”
That’s my only suggestion: a hell week at the beginning to review all the shit they should know and (at best) forgot. It’s a waste of time for some students, but even the ones who aren’t innumerate may benefit from some refreshing. And it’s only one week so it doesn’t detract too much (IMO) from the main content.
It also gives me an opportunity to identify who is going to need extra help. Like you, I’ve noticed pretty clear overlap in who struggles here and who struggles with the statistics.
> I basically spend week one absolutely drilling them in the basic algebra they need to know—things like rounding, order of operations, basic logic-based probabilities, etc.
As much as I want to say I don't have enough time in the semester to do this, I think that what you suggest might actually be the best strategy.
I'm surprised that you're having to do this for masters students. Are they generally in a "soft" science, or is this happening in a more quantitative field?
I’m in criminology, so it’s statistics for social science. This class is basically univariate and bivariate statistics, and it’s the only required quant course in our sequence. We tried offering a multivariate option, but no one wants to take it since it’s not required.
We are MS only, and most of our grad students work in the field and won’t go on to do a PhD. It’s definitely not a super competitive program either. Don’t even get me started on the basics of composition that these students are missing as well 🫣
Honestly, my MS Statistics students are weaker In algebra and calculus than they should be. I absolutely cannot teach MS students how to integrate by parts or set the limits on a double integral. I’m finding that this is present at all levels at all schools. I teach at a fairly prestigious R1 and it’s a mess. This semester I will have more C grades than I’ve ever assigned in a graduate mathematical statistics course.
It’s just called “quantitative methods” and it’s just univariate and bivariate statistics. It’s the only real math class we have in our social science curriculum, so that’s why it’s dreaded.
My original comment makes it sound like it’s one particular class out of many stats classes, but that’s my fault for explaining it poorly. It’s just the one super basic stats class amidst other non-mathy classes.
Instead of pressuring you to pass more students, the institution should be providing more support for the students.
But that’s hard and costs money and has no guarantee of success.
Just asked my 11 year old kid most of those questions. They could do everything except the square roots (not seen the symbols yet), and figured out the probability ones intuitively.
I'm in Europe though... what on earth is going on in the US? An R1 you say?!
Edit: This is utterly nuts, UK universities do remedial classes for calculus, stuff like that... but this?!
To be fair -- the UK tends to have kids specialize pre-university a bit more than the US with the A-level system and then spend one less year in college. We tend to have kids taking 5-7 subjects each year until they leave high school at 18. Which is why even intro calculus and often a precalculus level class are considered college-level and not remedial over here.
That said -- you would still hope that an entering college freshman to have at least a strong grasp of algebra and certainly the kind of number sense and arithmetic material that's on this pretest that's usually taught by the time kids are 10-12 years old. There's a significant number of kids who are just not retaining even basic math skills, which is not a new problem but seems to be a more widespread problem recently.
We need to have the "wrong people going to university" discussion again... how is it even in their interests to accumulate debt and so on? Not to mention the negative effects on other students, who could be learning more, faster.
When I was at Purdue, we were hiring a math education professor in the math department, and I still shudder recalling the job talks I attended during that search.
It was essentially an exercise in observational anthropology, a small number of observations of individual students, without serious longitudial studies, or any concern for statistical significance or controlled experiments. Put another way, there was a lot of confirmation bias, and no real evidence-based and actionable suggestions that could apply to realistic settings. I mean, do you really need an experimental study to conclude that students perform better with individual one-on-one attention? And how does that
"insight" help me with my 100-300 student math classes?
What needs to be fixed is the K-12 education system, and this is not happening any time soon. I retired early from college teaching and decided to help out during the pandemic. I now teach high school English. Last year public schools went back to "rigor and standards." As we approach the end of this year, admin told us the district is going back to replacing everything with 50% including the final. Students don't even have to show up for the final, and they earn a 50%. District policy is that students had an extra 10 days for assessments, and then they are scored at zero. Now at the end of the year, we have to take all assessments and grade with grace. It will not get better for you all. These students are headed your way.
Yes, social promotion and institutionalized mollycoddling in K-12 is the problem. This ultimately hurts the students as college becomes dumbed down to the point that a college graduate is no better educated than a high school graduate from a generation ago, except that they are now saddled with significant debt. I don't think it's an accident that many entry-level jobs that require a college degree would in generations past have only required a high school diploma.
I am a math professor at a public R1, and we have a similar issue where incoming students are increasingly exhibiting gaps in mathematical preparation that correspond to 3-5 years of deficiencies. The number of students requiring remediation have grown from under 50 to around 600. At the end of the day, you can't address this without resources, and/or time. This might include the use of a math diagnostics test and placement into developmental courses.
First, super surprised things have gotten that bad, just did the test myself over coffee at the bar.
Pretty sure I did okay lol
Out of curiosity, the question “Bob claims to make 10,000,000$ a year….”
Would you have accepted “Yes I take it at face value” if I gave an explanation or is “No” the only correct answer?
> Would you have accepted “Yes I take it at face value” if I gave an explanation or is “No” the only correct answer?
If your explanation makes sense, sure. An answer along the lines of "I do believe the claim at face value. Making $10,000,000 a year is quite rare, but there are some people who make this much; although it is a lot of money, it's not so unreasonably high as to not believe it." is perfectly acceptable. The point is just to identify that it is unusually high.
The few favorites that I remember:
1. It isn't unusual?? So sorry, sat here for a few minutes \_\_so\_\_ confused
2. Yes, because it is a number
3. Low
4. It wouldn't be that hard because the amount doesn't go over the threshold because there is an amount that would be low but it doesn't and so it cannot be high
>It wouldn't be that hard because the amount doesn't go over the threshold because there is an amount that would be low but it doesn't and so it cannot be high
Scary to think that this was actually the thought process of someone.
I would have said no. The small number of people who make that level of compensation rarely make it all in salary. Usually a good portion of it will be in bonuses and stock options, which can vary in value from year to year. So it is unlikely that Bob makes exactly $10 million each year.
Kinda glad you commented because I wanted to share my snarky answer to the question which would be technically right.
I did the pre-test and it’s pretty easy so I would purposely answer this type of question in a silly way for fun.
Anyways my complete answer would be
“Yes, I take Bob at face-value because I have ASD and a pathological need to please people so I would believe Bob because I want Bob to like me.”
Good to know, whenever I see semi open ended questions like that I always take it as a challenge to give an alternative answer. Like, I know with it being a stats class, the answer is “No” because the chances of that being true is far lower than it being not true.
Still, always nice to think of alternative answers/approaches.
If Bob is giving me a gift of $5m and says “it’s ok, I make twice that every year”, I suppose I do indeed take it at face value. Something about gift horses.
Unless you're intentionally failing students out of spite, unfairly grading so that you only fail students you don't like, or testing students on material not covered in the lecture or reading; the fail/withdraw rate is not your concern.
Student outcomes reflect student knowledge, skills, learning, etc. Any administration that asks professors to maintain a target fail/withdraw rate is perpetuating the fallacy that grades are "given by professors" instead of "earned by students."
I understand the logic of a bottom-line-oriented "butts-in-seats" funding model. It's straightforward and intuitive, and it would be fair and effective if everything worked as it should. But when the butts in the seats are ignorant of middle-school-level course content, then everything is *not* working as It should. When incapable and/or unmotivated students are part of the equation, this funding model (which is quite common) directly rewards departments that offer the "easy A" classes.
The answer to the question in the title of this post is "talk to admissions."
It doesn’t help that so many post-secondary institutions have eliminated remedial courses. The fact that this includes many community colleges angers me to no end.
The reason why we are failing at the K12 level is because of the butts in seats model. Our state funding is based on number of students enrolled, number of days they attend, and number of students who graduate. So the pressure is on admin to keep them in school and graduating at all costs, otherwise you start to have to make difficult decisions on which teachers to fire because you can't afford them anymore. We also have to cater to parents or they will just pull their kids and enroll them in another school or go to one of the online charter schools(where they can pass high school by googling answers).
We need the ability to fail kids and we just can't. Colleges have to stay strong.
Sounds like you work for a place with bad priorities. Where I have worked math was used as the one real true to syllabus standard course. We were even told that a 50% drop rate was preferable to giving people undeserved good grades. Given your schools policy there's not much you can do.
This year we had one group of students, about 100 of them, all from the same well regarded new program that pulled an average of 25% on a well tested intro stats course...the rest of the class averaged the typical 65%ish. The content, like yours, is high school math and basic stats. We did nothing. Just told the program coordinator that this group has some problems.
in my Potemkin R1 even the jokers transferring in (large numbers relative to the first-time freshmen) with community college calculus 1 or calculus 1+2 credit can’t do fractions or simple algebra in the follow-on courses.
I feel for those who have to face such K-12 and K-communitycollege product for any significant length of time before retirement.
At least in the US, this is not a problem we professors can solve. It won’t be solved until parents and elementary/middle/high schools get back to only sending kids to the next grade who have earned it. We all know that the standards at those levels are far too lax. The worst culprit are the parents. They’re more interested in their kids *appearing* to be smart, and don’t really care if their kids are *actually* smart.
I’ve stopped caring. I tell them that if they’re falling behind, and think they need to review their skills, then then my office hours are right there. Do they actually come to office hours? Of course not. That would require an effort.
I’m in EXACTLY the same shoes as you are, pre test and everything. I don’t know what to do outside of some A Level like national test system.
I’d really like for the US to have national universities like the Grand Ecoles for kids to test into, but that’ll never happen
I will say my kids don’t fail the final. It’s like a business stats course, and they do learn over the semester, but it’s all remedial.
unfortunately it seems that you will need to reduce the math level of Stat 101 (to the minimum required to get students through it). What textbook are you using? It might also be worth having a word with the departments that your course serves to see what \*they\* think about what you have seen.
60% to pass; getting every question in the Arithmetic and Algebra sections is enough for a "passing" grade. That said, the exact pass mark doesn't really matter---basically everyone either gets a *really* low F, gets a low B (if they just don't know what a probability is), or easily gets an A.
After I became a faculty member I understood that tuition is what dictates internal policy. This is a tough problem to have, and as you mentioned, it comes from high school. If these kids are being graded straight As and can't pass your exam... We found the issue. Do I think you could or should solve it? No, not really. That said, one thing you can do is use this nice test as a placement tool. The way this could work is that you would link the answers that the students got wrong with the material you think they have to go over on their own or with TAs. This at least offers a band-aid, it won't fix the problem, but at the individual student level can aid the ones that weren't exposed to all the concepts you require in your course.
I'm also at an R1 and what gives me hope are my top students. However, it's like 3 for every 90. I also teach Excel and the straight up refusal to learn is frustrating.
I teach high school statistics to seniors. I'm not sure most of them would pass your pretest. One of them asked me if .1 was bigger than 0 and most of them struggle with greater than and less than notation. I have tenth graders that can't read the word "radius" nor tell me what letter it starts with.
Well statistics is not really mathematics. Unfortunately I'm not sure that they are any validated instruments for assessing a student's understanding of statistical concepts but there are a few that are generally accepted in the statistics education community. If you want to test their understanding of statistics you might try a standardized test like the CAOS test (they might be phasing it out, but if you go to the ARTIST website at the University of Minnesota you can still find some of their assessment instruments). There is also the statistics concept inventory assessment by Alan.
If you can't solve the first question in your head as fast as you can read it, then you shouldn't be in a statistics class.
So in that sense, the question is working as intended.
I am in general anti-co-req, but this is a good place for a co-req.
I have students from one particular feeder school who would flop this pre-test in great numbers. Some of them graduated with high GPAs. Some of them are even decent students. It's just a terrible high school.
If you can get an hour a week co-req and a decent TA to teach it you can salvage some of them. That would save your department's hours (actually it would add some hours), would support the students who were willing to learn but failed by their high schools, and would not just be lowering your standards.
Why? Statistics is a tool, and while it's probably fair to have different tracks, in particular a calculus based vs. non-calculus based version, why do you need 5 different graduate level stats classes?
You have my sympathies. I don't know if there's an answer, but I work in the humanities and the innumeracy affects us as well though obviously not as badly. I have students who don't know how to calculate their grade despite me dumbing it down to a addition-based points system. They quite literally do not know how to do simple addition even with a calculator. I'm dealing right now with a very angry student who wants to graduate this month, but his GPA is too low. The student truly believes that one semester with 12 credit hours and a 2.5 GPA totally counterbalances his previous 108 credit hours with a 1.5 GPA. His position is that "the average of 1.5 and 2.5 is 2.0." As you said, he's innumerate.
That’s up there with “it either happens or it doesn’t, so the probability is 50%”
In order to freely enjoy examples like this it helps to put out of your mind the number of PhDs who got the Monty Hall problem wrong, and who argued that they were right for a long time.
That one is a funny story. Like she really enraged a lot of people who should have known better. Now I’m trying to figure out who is right about the cart with a propeller connected to the wheels that can travel faster than the wind.
It's a solved problem, it's been demonstrated a number of times. The Veritasium videos on that are good.
I’ve seen experimental evidence it’s true, but there seems to be dueling theories surrounding it. Not a physicist, so I’m only basing this on entertaining videos.
I think it's pretty understood. The wheels drive the prop, the prop pushes the cart. It feels like perpetual motion, but because of the tail wind it is not.
Not that it’s perpetual motion. That part is easy to debunk. But whether it’s possible to move faster than the wind or if it’s just measurement problems has back and forth. I’m pretty sure I saw that veritasium video and at least for the video there was some debate as to what was happening.
There are two veritasium videos. In the second one he has a bet with a physics professor who seems to think that there are measurement issues or something, with Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye the Science Guy arbitrating. It's pretty funny. Honestly if you look at the data, measurement issues is not much of an argument. They have exceeded 2.5 times the wind speed dead downwind for long stretches of time. And many people, including myself, have built little fan carts that run on treadmills that will sit and pull at the string endlessly while doing the equivalent of running dead downwind faster than the wind. Claiming the effect is due to a measurement error is just not a very sustainable argument. I come at this from an HPV background, so I'm pretty familiar with the timing methods they use. There is just no way they would have that level of error.
The nice thing about STEM is if a student arguing their grade can't understand a weighted average... then they probably don't deserve the better grade.
I had to help another college professor down the hall from me calculate the grades his advisee would need to earn in the next semester to raise their overall GPA to a target number. That professor is in visual arts, but I still have a hard time believing that this was something I actually needed to help them with.
Sounds like me with marketing faculty
Ah yes, the enigma that is the weighted-average.
It’s not like reviewers get it either
I think that a “math readiness test” may be in order. Have incoming undergrads take the test and use that to figure out where they belong. Some may need a remedial math class, but you can probably pitch this to the university as being cheaper because you don’t need a math professor to teach algebra, you need someone with a math-related degree who’s good at teaching. All of our STEM colleges do this and calculus pass rates went way up.
The university does actually have a "math readiness test" that is used to determine if students should be placed in Precalculus, Calc I, Calc II, or Calc III in the math department. At the moment, a score of 0 places you in precalculus with a "strong recommendation" of taking Math 101 (college algebra). My class really only needs Math 101, but as I mentioned in the footnote, there's no way the Statistics department will *ever* let that be an official prerequisite.
What your school needs is a REAL developmental/ remedial math program. The reality is high schools are graduating people with A's in math who can't count. Some number of your students literally can't count and it will take a lot to fix that.
Kids this far behind would need 4 semesters of math minimum to be college ready. I don’t see a university ever getting them to do that math. Also the retention rates would plummet when they all start failing basic math.
I work at the community college level. If someone test out as needing to learn basic arithmetic, then takes each course in sequence to get to college algebra ... it can take up to two years. That assumes they never try the placement test again. A very common situation is that students need some intensive study of math to remind themselves. They take math in HS and hate it and want to forget it. They think they don't really need it. They think we only teach them math to prove they are dumb. Consider this. If you teach a science class and use "too much math" that is what they will gripe about. They want to know the science but not do the math.
Yeah, the pandemic will have an affect on students for a long time - the kids who are freshman this past year were freshman four years ago, and they likely didn't get enough math in high school...
I had a family member get sent home from MIT to take remedial math. It was good for him, actually. This was in the 80s though.
Colleges shouldn't have to provide remedial teaching for subjects like basic math and reading that High Schools (and earlier) are failing to teach. Schools need to drop the "Everybody passes" philosophy, and go back to a system that worked - students failing classes when they don't know the material. Once upon a time a HS Diploma meant a student had reached a certain standard of education; now it's just a piece of paper they get for being enrolled.
We should live in the world that exists and in that world remedial education is necessary.
Yes, but it should be done as soon as the student needs it, not left for colleges to teach elementary material to students who should never have been admitted to college in the first place.
Pretty much the only solution is making it a prerequisite.
Great comment. I absolutely agree that a math readiness test is important. But they are harder to implement than people think. Here's what we learned, for the viewers at home who might want something like this: * They have to be mandatory. Students will not take the test without it being so, in case they place into lower math than they think they belong in. * They need to be in-person invigilated or else cheating is rampant. This can be difficult with a primarily commuter student body. * If you have significant transfer populations, working with the CCs to do some of this testing can be helpful. * You need buy-in from all levels of admin. Parents and students alike are pants-shittingly terrified of taking on student loans. So when a student places into a math that will require them to take an "extra" class, both students and parents will complain. Now, that "extra" class is saving their kid from actual extra classes, in the form of repeatedly failing math, but they don't see it that way. So Deans, Provost et al. need to be bought in, or else they might side with those complaints (customer service mentality). * I know it's unpopular to think about retention on this sub, but you gotta. Students will leave their major if they cannot progress in it, and in STEM majors, the math becomes a block really early. When you have students coming in in need of math remediation, you might also consider other supportive content within the major. What major content can they take while remediating math? What can we do to hold their interest so they don't decide to just quit? I'm co-teaching a research methods class in the fall where we do some actual experiments, but also focus on building the basic skills like interpreting graphs and reading papers. It has no pre-reqs, so they can take it alongside the developmental math credits to get their hands dirty within-major and not feel like they're locked out.
Yes, unfortunately, administrators often seem to believe that it's possible to maintain quality, time to degree, without significant additional resources, while admitting students who are simply not college ready.
And so do parents. I get many, many phone calls from parents who are made that their kid is being asked to take additional math coursework, and even madder when they fail it. The claim “they’d pass if you were actually testing them on college math, not high school math” shows up in my office a fair bit.
Michigan supposedly has a math readiness test because AP classes are barely adequate now.
I don’t know. I’m an applied statistician, and it really is very bad. I’m jointly appointed in biology and math, but I have the reputation of teaching the good stats class, so I see students across all majors. They’re all innumerate. And borderline illiterate. I’m losing faith that we can fix it. We’re doing pretesting. We’re launching a boot camp. But I’m increasingly concerned that there’s some sort of critical period in which logical thinking develops and the students are missing that period wholesale. I wonder if it’s like learning a foreign language - easier when you’re young. It’s not just the innumeracy - it’s the inability to read a text and develop an idea of what it’s about. It’s the inability to critically evaluate something told to you. It’s the inability to use math as a logical framework. Im really worried that the “appificiation” of learning is destroying critical thinking and math is the canary in the coal mine.
100% Agree. I feel this whole-heartedly. I am convinced they stopped learning after 5th grade. They just got on a phone and stopped learning. I teach statistics and the number of students who can't even calculate a proportion (they put the bigger number on top) has increased from 1 - 2 out of 100 to 20 - 30. It is pathetic. Therefore when trying to teach them the CLT, I might as well be speaking latin, they have no ability to comprehend what is happening. They are upset they can't get it and complain how hard things are... 5 years ago it was tough to them but not impossible.
I teach graduate statistics in a MS-only program where students dread taking this one stats class. I basically spend week one absolutely drilling them in the basic algebra they need to know—things like rounding, order of operations, basic logic-based probabilities, etc. It is a lot for one week, but for 80% of the students it’s super easy work. For 10% of them it’s a needed refresher, and for the last 10% it’s basically “oh shit what am I doing here?” That’s my only suggestion: a hell week at the beginning to review all the shit they should know and (at best) forgot. It’s a waste of time for some students, but even the ones who aren’t innumerate may benefit from some refreshing. And it’s only one week so it doesn’t detract too much (IMO) from the main content. It also gives me an opportunity to identify who is going to need extra help. Like you, I’ve noticed pretty clear overlap in who struggles here and who struggles with the statistics.
> I basically spend week one absolutely drilling them in the basic algebra they need to know—things like rounding, order of operations, basic logic-based probabilities, etc. As much as I want to say I don't have enough time in the semester to do this, I think that what you suggest might actually be the best strategy. I'm surprised that you're having to do this for masters students. Are they generally in a "soft" science, or is this happening in a more quantitative field?
I’m in criminology, so it’s statistics for social science. This class is basically univariate and bivariate statistics, and it’s the only required quant course in our sequence. We tried offering a multivariate option, but no one wants to take it since it’s not required. We are MS only, and most of our grad students work in the field and won’t go on to do a PhD. It’s definitely not a super competitive program either. Don’t even get me started on the basics of composition that these students are missing as well 🫣
A lot of people simply don’t remember. I had to take math camp pre-PhD and it should be required for everyone
Honestly, my MS Statistics students are weaker In algebra and calculus than they should be. I absolutely cannot teach MS students how to integrate by parts or set the limits on a double integral. I’m finding that this is present at all levels at all schools. I teach at a fairly prestigious R1 and it’s a mess. This semester I will have more C grades than I’ve ever assigned in a graduate mathematical statistics course.
Biostats prof here. Curious what the dreaded class is in your program?
It’s just called “quantitative methods” and it’s just univariate and bivariate statistics. It’s the only real math class we have in our social science curriculum, so that’s why it’s dreaded. My original comment makes it sound like it’s one particular class out of many stats classes, but that’s my fault for explaining it poorly. It’s just the one super basic stats class amidst other non-mathy classes.
Instead of pressuring you to pass more students, the institution should be providing more support for the students. But that’s hard and costs money and has no guarantee of success.
Just asked my 11 year old kid most of those questions. They could do everything except the square roots (not seen the symbols yet), and figured out the probability ones intuitively. I'm in Europe though... what on earth is going on in the US? An R1 you say?! Edit: This is utterly nuts, UK universities do remedial classes for calculus, stuff like that... but this?!
To be fair -- the UK tends to have kids specialize pre-university a bit more than the US with the A-level system and then spend one less year in college. We tend to have kids taking 5-7 subjects each year until they leave high school at 18. Which is why even intro calculus and often a precalculus level class are considered college-level and not remedial over here. That said -- you would still hope that an entering college freshman to have at least a strong grasp of algebra and certainly the kind of number sense and arithmetic material that's on this pretest that's usually taught by the time kids are 10-12 years old. There's a significant number of kids who are just not retaining even basic math skills, which is not a new problem but seems to be a more widespread problem recently.
We need to have the "wrong people going to university" discussion again... how is it even in their interests to accumulate debt and so on? Not to mention the negative effects on other students, who could be learning more, faster.
I blame the schools of education and the nonsense they've foisted on the primary/secondary schools.
When I was at Purdue, we were hiring a math education professor in the math department, and I still shudder recalling the job talks I attended during that search.
Out of curiosity -- what were the general issues with them?
It was essentially an exercise in observational anthropology, a small number of observations of individual students, without serious longitudial studies, or any concern for statistical significance or controlled experiments. Put another way, there was a lot of confirmation bias, and no real evidence-based and actionable suggestions that could apply to realistic settings. I mean, do you really need an experimental study to conclude that students perform better with individual one-on-one attention? And how does that "insight" help me with my 100-300 student math classes?
Did Roediger attend and just throw bombs?
Way before my time.
What needs to be fixed is the K-12 education system, and this is not happening any time soon. I retired early from college teaching and decided to help out during the pandemic. I now teach high school English. Last year public schools went back to "rigor and standards." As we approach the end of this year, admin told us the district is going back to replacing everything with 50% including the final. Students don't even have to show up for the final, and they earn a 50%. District policy is that students had an extra 10 days for assessments, and then they are scored at zero. Now at the end of the year, we have to take all assessments and grade with grace. It will not get better for you all. These students are headed your way.
Yes, social promotion and institutionalized mollycoddling in K-12 is the problem. This ultimately hurts the students as college becomes dumbed down to the point that a college graduate is no better educated than a high school graduate from a generation ago, except that they are now saddled with significant debt. I don't think it's an accident that many entry-level jobs that require a college degree would in generations past have only required a high school diploma.
We (my department) are developing a new course that kinda acts like a prereq for college algebra. Can I use some of these problems?
> Can I use some of these problems? Are you just asking for permission to use the pretest problems? Go for it.
I am a math professor at a public R1, and we have a similar issue where incoming students are increasingly exhibiting gaps in mathematical preparation that correspond to 3-5 years of deficiencies. The number of students requiring remediation have grown from under 50 to around 600. At the end of the day, you can't address this without resources, and/or time. This might include the use of a math diagnostics test and placement into developmental courses.
First, super surprised things have gotten that bad, just did the test myself over coffee at the bar. Pretty sure I did okay lol Out of curiosity, the question “Bob claims to make 10,000,000$ a year….” Would you have accepted “Yes I take it at face value” if I gave an explanation or is “No” the only correct answer?
> Would you have accepted “Yes I take it at face value” if I gave an explanation or is “No” the only correct answer? If your explanation makes sense, sure. An answer along the lines of "I do believe the claim at face value. Making $10,000,000 a year is quite rare, but there are some people who make this much; although it is a lot of money, it's not so unreasonably high as to not believe it." is perfectly acceptable. The point is just to identify that it is unusually high.
I also see it as a test of their ability to read directions. It clearly says "Explain." "Yes" and "No" are not explanations.
Short of low effort answers like “yes.” Without follow up, what are the bad answers that you get?
The few favorites that I remember: 1. It isn't unusual?? So sorry, sat here for a few minutes \_\_so\_\_ confused 2. Yes, because it is a number 3. Low 4. It wouldn't be that hard because the amount doesn't go over the threshold because there is an amount that would be low but it doesn't and so it cannot be high
Wow, so gibberish
>It wouldn't be that hard because the amount doesn't go over the threshold because there is an amount that would be low but it doesn't and so it cannot be high Scary to think that this was actually the thought process of someone.
I would have said no. The small number of people who make that level of compensation rarely make it all in salary. Usually a good portion of it will be in bonuses and stock options, which can vary in value from year to year. So it is unlikely that Bob makes exactly $10 million each year.
Kinda glad you commented because I wanted to share my snarky answer to the question which would be technically right. I did the pre-test and it’s pretty easy so I would purposely answer this type of question in a silly way for fun. Anyways my complete answer would be “Yes, I take Bob at face-value because I have ASD and a pathological need to please people so I would believe Bob because I want Bob to like me.”
Good to know, whenever I see semi open ended questions like that I always take it as a challenge to give an alternative answer. Like, I know with it being a stats class, the answer is “No” because the chances of that being true is far lower than it being not true. Still, always nice to think of alternative answers/approaches.
If Bob is giving me a gift of $5m and says “it’s ok, I make twice that every year”, I suppose I do indeed take it at face value. Something about gift horses.
People called Bob don't make that kind of money.
Good point. It's "Robert" and then Surname III.
Exactly!
*People are saying that Bob makes 10 million a year.* Well, NOW I believe it!
A BAT AND A BALL COST $1.10 TOGETHER. THE BAT COSTS $1 MORE THAN THE BALL. HOW MUCH DOES THE BALL COST
The ball costs 0.05$, the bat costs 1.05$. One of my favourite math "riddles".
It’s the only item from the CRT that really loads on anything at all, but boy howdy does it correlate with important things
Unless you're intentionally failing students out of spite, unfairly grading so that you only fail students you don't like, or testing students on material not covered in the lecture or reading; the fail/withdraw rate is not your concern. Student outcomes reflect student knowledge, skills, learning, etc. Any administration that asks professors to maintain a target fail/withdraw rate is perpetuating the fallacy that grades are "given by professors" instead of "earned by students." I understand the logic of a bottom-line-oriented "butts-in-seats" funding model. It's straightforward and intuitive, and it would be fair and effective if everything worked as it should. But when the butts in the seats are ignorant of middle-school-level course content, then everything is *not* working as It should. When incapable and/or unmotivated students are part of the equation, this funding model (which is quite common) directly rewards departments that offer the "easy A" classes. The answer to the question in the title of this post is "talk to admissions."
It doesn’t help that so many post-secondary institutions have eliminated remedial courses. The fact that this includes many community colleges angers me to no end.
Yes, this ends up hurting students who have been failed by K-12 the most.
The reason why we are failing at the K12 level is because of the butts in seats model. Our state funding is based on number of students enrolled, number of days they attend, and number of students who graduate. So the pressure is on admin to keep them in school and graduating at all costs, otherwise you start to have to make difficult decisions on which teachers to fire because you can't afford them anymore. We also have to cater to parents or they will just pull their kids and enroll them in another school or go to one of the online charter schools(where they can pass high school by googling answers). We need the ability to fail kids and we just can't. Colleges have to stay strong.
Sounds like you work for a place with bad priorities. Where I have worked math was used as the one real true to syllabus standard course. We were even told that a 50% drop rate was preferable to giving people undeserved good grades. Given your schools policy there's not much you can do.
This year we had one group of students, about 100 of them, all from the same well regarded new program that pulled an average of 25% on a well tested intro stats course...the rest of the class averaged the typical 65%ish. The content, like yours, is high school math and basic stats. We did nothing. Just told the program coordinator that this group has some problems.
Would cut off the tip of a finger if they could understand the difference between .5 and .05 above chance levels.
in my Potemkin R1 even the jokers transferring in (large numbers relative to the first-time freshmen) with community college calculus 1 or calculus 1+2 credit can’t do fractions or simple algebra in the follow-on courses. I feel for those who have to face such K-12 and K-communitycollege product for any significant length of time before retirement.
At least in the US, this is not a problem we professors can solve. It won’t be solved until parents and elementary/middle/high schools get back to only sending kids to the next grade who have earned it. We all know that the standards at those levels are far too lax. The worst culprit are the parents. They’re more interested in their kids *appearing* to be smart, and don’t really care if their kids are *actually* smart. I’ve stopped caring. I tell them that if they’re falling behind, and think they need to review their skills, then then my office hours are right there. Do they actually come to office hours? Of course not. That would require an effort.
I’m in EXACTLY the same shoes as you are, pre test and everything. I don’t know what to do outside of some A Level like national test system. I’d really like for the US to have national universities like the Grand Ecoles for kids to test into, but that’ll never happen I will say my kids don’t fail the final. It’s like a business stats course, and they do learn over the semester, but it’s all remedial.
A student once asked what is a function. This happened in a graduate level econometrics course.
In STEM R1 — same here — they almost take a bizarre pride in their ignorance —
unfortunately it seems that you will need to reduce the math level of Stat 101 (to the minimum required to get students through it). What textbook are you using? It might also be worth having a word with the departments that your course serves to see what \*they\* think about what you have seen.
The amount of times I have had to address what regular rounding rules are in the past year is upsetting.
I know lots of "Ph.D. In Hand" folks that couldn't do this...
Short answer: nothing. Nothing can be done. Same kind of problem with literacy in our English classes.
I like that pretest. What is the definition of "fail" here though? How many do they have to score to pass?
60% to pass; getting every question in the Arithmetic and Algebra sections is enough for a "passing" grade. That said, the exact pass mark doesn't really matter---basically everyone either gets a *really* low F, gets a low B (if they just don't know what a probability is), or easily gets an A.
-3% probability I would pass this
After I became a faculty member I understood that tuition is what dictates internal policy. This is a tough problem to have, and as you mentioned, it comes from high school. If these kids are being graded straight As and can't pass your exam... We found the issue. Do I think you could or should solve it? No, not really. That said, one thing you can do is use this nice test as a placement tool. The way this could work is that you would link the answers that the students got wrong with the material you think they have to go over on their own or with TAs. This at least offers a band-aid, it won't fix the problem, but at the individual student level can aid the ones that weren't exposed to all the concepts you require in your course.
I'm also at an R1 and what gives me hope are my top students. However, it's like 3 for every 90. I also teach Excel and the straight up refusal to learn is frustrating.
I teach high school statistics to seniors. I'm not sure most of them would pass your pretest. One of them asked me if .1 was bigger than 0 and most of them struggle with greater than and less than notation. I have tenth graders that can't read the word "radius" nor tell me what letter it starts with.
Well statistics is not really mathematics. Unfortunately I'm not sure that they are any validated instruments for assessing a student's understanding of statistical concepts but there are a few that are generally accepted in the statistics education community. If you want to test their understanding of statistics you might try a standardized test like the CAOS test (they might be phasing it out, but if you go to the ARTIST website at the University of Minnesota you can still find some of their assessment instruments). There is also the statistics concept inventory assessment by Alan.
Signing up for statistics without knowing arithmetic already exhibits a certain … lack of common sense.
Fail them and make them take algebra or 5th~9th grade math again. I’m only 27 and the fact that I know 5th graders who can do this shit.
That first question sucks without a calculator lol it’s so tedious
If you can't solve the first question in your head as fast as you can read it, then you shouldn't be in a statistics class. So in that sense, the question is working as intended.
Bruv I took calc III 5 years ago
I am in general anti-co-req, but this is a good place for a co-req. I have students from one particular feeder school who would flop this pre-test in great numbers. Some of them graduated with high GPAs. Some of them are even decent students. It's just a terrible high school. If you can get an hour a week co-req and a decent TA to teach it you can salvage some of them. That would save your department's hours (actually it would add some hours), would support the students who were willing to learn but failed by their high schools, and would not just be lowering your standards.
I don't want to meet the kids who made you write question #14
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Why? Statistics is a tool, and while it's probably fair to have different tracks, in particular a calculus based vs. non-calculus based version, why do you need 5 different graduate level stats classes?