“Cal State Will No Longer Require Placement Exams and Remedial Classes for Freshmen,” reads a Los Angeles Times headline. Don’t think that the 23-campus California State University system dumped remedial ed because its entering students are so well-prepared academically these days that they don’t need it.
No, quite the opposite seems to be the case at Cal State, where nearly 40 percent of freshmen arrive each fall unprepared to do college work in English, math, or both. And Cal State’s math placement exam sounds as though you don’t even need high school algebra in order to pass it: “It’s an exam that tests knowledge of percentages, exponents, and the Pythagorean Theorem,” according to a 2014 report from Southern California’s public radio station, KPPC. The KPPC report included an interview with a remedial-math teacher at California State University, Dominguez Hills, who had to go over such fourth-grade basics as adding two-fifths and one-fifth in order to bring her students up to speed. (Dominguez Hills might be the remediation capital of the Cal State system, with 80 percent of its entering freshmen needing at least one catch-up class, wrote the Sacramento Bee.) And still, so many students founder in the three remedial courses they could be required to pass during their first year at Cal State that many of them simply drop out of school. Less than 20 percent of Cal State’s full-time freshmen manage to graduate in four years (at the Dominguez Hills campus it’s just 5 percent).
The Cal State system, enrolling about 420,000 undergraduates overall, is second-tier to the more prestigious and more competitive University of California system, but nonetheless students must be in the top-third of their high school classes to qualify for admission. So you would think that the sky-high remediation percentages at Cal State would be an indictment of California’s dismal public K-12 system, which ranks 10th from the bottom among the 50 states and the District of Columbia.
But no—the prevailing idea in California is to blame the placement tests and the remedial classes themselves. Here’s the Los Angeles Times:
So, beginning in the fall of 2018:
Getting rid of remedial coursework for freshmen who are behind is actually a national fad in higher education. A few years ago, it became common to regard remedial courses, which were supposed to help poorly prepared students qualify to do college work, more as “barriers” to achieving college degrees. The Public Policy Institute of California issued a report in 2015 advocating that colleges get rid of placement practices that “stand in the way” of students’ achieving their “academic goals.” It became commonplace to wonder why young people who had straight-A averages in their high school couldn’t “reach their dream” of college graduation because, well, they were facing the “roadblocks” of remediation.
As a result of sentiments such as these, two-year California community colleges, which are essentially open-enrollment and thus heavily freighted with remedial courses, began ”rethinking” the classes. The Cal State move away from remedial classes indicates that four-year institutions are beginning to follow suit.
Logic ought to dictate that the real problem might be substandard K-12 education, or rampant grade inflation that awards A’s to high-schoolers who can’t read, write, or compute very well, or that institutions of higher learning are admitting too many unqualified applicants. But it seems now that the purpose of higher education is actually to make students feel good by awarding them degrees, even if they can’t write a grammatical English sentence or add a couple of fractions.
