Credit: Andrew Reed / EdSource
No parent, teacher, adviser, or other responsible educator would ever recommend, much less require, a student to take a course they had only a 20% chance of passing. But that is exactly the new policy that the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office is implementing.
This new policy is in response to Assembly Bill 1705, passed in 2022, which sought to prevent students from getting stuck in remedial classes, a genuine problem in community colleges. Unfortunately, the new law overcorrected and now requires that every student who needs calculus for their declared major be enrolled directly in calculus unless data “validates” that the student is “highly unlikely to succeed.” The community college chancellor’s office has set a failure rate of 85% as their operational definition of “highly unlikely to succeed.” (ESLEI 24-15) Thus, any STEM major who has at least a 15% chance of passing will be enrolled directly into calculus. For these students with better than a 15% chance of passing calculus, any “prior to calculus pathway” will be discontinued as a “placement and enrollment option beyond July 1, 2027” (12-10-24 Updated Guidance).
Would you take a course you had an 85% chance of failing? Would you recommend it? The failure threshold of 85% defies common sense. But it also defies established education norms. Virtually all educators and administrators consider calculus failure rates in excess of 30% worrisome. Several expert faculty groups, including the CSU Mathematics Council, the Academic Senate of the California Community Colleges and the Academic Senate of the California State University, have all sounded the alarm (in vain) with resolutions opposing the 85% failure criteria.
Norms and expert opinions aside, a large study by the RP Group, the community colleges’ internal research organization, very clearly illustrated the absurdity of the 85% threshold. The study applied this threshold to over 45,000 community college STEM majors who enrolled in a calculus pathway between 2012 and 2020. The study concluded that no group of students — even those missing one and two full years of calculus prerequisites — met this extreme threshold. Does any responsible educator believe students lacking two full years of mathematics preparation should be sent directly to calculus?
To help mitigate this issue, community colleges are being charged to “develop corequisite supports at calculus … for students that require additional support.” This additional coursework would be taken alongside the four and often five units of calculus. It will help those who can fit it into the already busy STEM major schedule. But it should not be expected to make up for years of preparatory math classes or sufficiently reduce risk to those who start out with less than a 50% chance of passing.
This community college experiment in skipping mathematics prerequisites is coming on the heels of the longer-term impacts of Covid on learning. California’s students are struggling with math. Statewide, roughly only a third of students in grades 3-8 and 11 are meeting standards in math. A recent report from UC San Diego noted that since the Covid pandemic, there has been a “steep decline” in the preparation of students entering the university, with 1 in 12 having only middle school level math skills. And these are students who qualified for admission to UC and have supposedly completed all the calculus prerequisites. Instead of eliminating calculus preparation, the UCs will be expanding it. They plan to redouble the opportunities for students to catch up and learn what they missed out on in high school. Pushing them straight into calculus is recognized by the UC as setting them up for failure.
Many educators say the community college policy will fall hardest on Black and Hispanic students, who are less likely to have successfully completed the proper preparation in high school. Requiring enrollment directly into calculus by those missing one or two years of preparation will frustrate both instructors and students, amplify failure rates, and discourage many from declaring a STEM major in the first place.
Over the next two years, as more and more students bypass prerequisites, nobody should be surprised when we see calculus failure rates of 50%, 60%, 70%, or even 80%. Unfortunately, all of these terrible failure rates fall below the current 85% “validation” threshold. The community colleges’ chancellor’s policy will restrict all students in these at-risk cohorts from enrolling in prior-to-calculus pathways.
Between now and July 1, 2027, community colleges have the opportunity to develop and assess new preparatory classes and to collect data on the success and failure of students with similar preparation that do and don’t go straight to calculus. But many feel these efforts are futile and represent wasted time and energy, given the impossible conditions that must be met to avoid the discontinuance of any “prior-to-calculus” pathways, whether new or existing. Changing policy now, not later, will encourage data collection and innovative curriculum development.
It is time for the community colleges’ chancellor to heed the data results and expert warnings and rethink AB 1705 implementation policies. The absurd 85% validation failure rate should be sensibly revised to 40% or even 35%. Further, when the colleges evaluate the impact of this policy, calculus completion data should be based on first attempts and include all withdrawals and “D” grades as failures. And every student should now and forever be permitted their personal choice to enroll in a calculus preparation course.
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Richard Ford is a professor emeritus and former mathematics and statistics department chair at California State University, Chico. He served as chair of the Academic Preparation and Education Programs Committee (APEP) of the Academic Senate of the CSU in 2021-22.
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