Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwawayjava | Hacker News Reader

The course "College Algebra" has the highest fail rate among all university courses in the US; this course covers roughly what you already should've seen in high school. A lot of time is spent e.g. practicing arithmetic, plotting polynomials, solving linear equations, and so on. See this book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book:College_Mathematics:_Alge...

For many students, this is the only mathematics course they take for their degree and they fail/drop multiple times before finally succeeding. For those students, their mathematics course in college is quite literally a repeat of high school.

It's worth noting that many colleges have even more remedial mathematics courses, which (no joke) cover elementary school stuff. E.g. the standard algorithm for division...

So in some sense I would agree with Dowwie's concern, but also point out that we already have this problem anyways, so there isn't much to lose.

View on HN

> 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.

Once 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.

I 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...

We should absolutely ensure that people get a quality education and that the rigor of the programs are aligned with the difficulty of the field of study. There's nothing wrong with having 'weeder' courses early on to ensure that people are capable of completing the program they are in.

That is different from "competitive" admissions. Which, in my interpretation, is artificially limiting the number of admissions such that perfectly qualified (or overqualified) people are rejected for nebulous reasons (i.e., not a "good fit") in an effort to maintain prestige.

> It's worth noting that many colleges have even more remedial mathematics courses, which (no joke) cover elementary school stuff. E.g. the standard algorithm for division...

Mathematics education sucks in most of the US. In large parts of the country, how far you're able to go is determined by how well you do in your math classes at like 10 years old. If you do poorly, then it's very likely you'll be stuck on a tract that will never teach you to solve linear equations. Those that do well end up learning integral calculus before college.

Additionally, you have to consider that returning students may have not had a math class in a decade+ and it's hard to know where to start everyone. So it makes sense to start people from arithmetic. My mother went for her degree in her 50s and literally started at Kindergarten math and worked her way up from there.

> We should absolutely ensure that people get a quality education and that the rigor of the programs are aligned with the difficulty of the field of study... That is different from "competitive" admissions. Which, in my interpretation, is artificially limiting the number of admissions such that perfectly qualified

That's totally fair. In that case, I think this is a difference in wording/failure to communicate more than it is an actual substantive disagreement.

I agree with the problem that you identified. I don't think that the correct solution to that problem is to start teaching middle school math in universities.

Night classes and/or GED prep courses are a better option for people who need to re-do high school.

Of course, fixing k12 education would be an even better option...

I'm sorry, but I fail to see how this relates to what dowwie wrote.

He said:

>> if a state managed to arrange an associate's degree program paid by taxes, the programs would teach that which should have already been taught in high school. These college programs aren't college.

Emphasis added.

I provided a concrete example of where this is already happening in higher ed: the mathematics course that a huge percentage of students take in college are covering material that's supposed to be covered in high school.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com