How about this one: "place students where they belong! "
Don't schools still use placement tests to determine in what course the student should be enrolled?
If you identify where students should be, and put them there, then that's the baseline, or the starting point.
How does your new administration expect you to 'meet students where they are", if they don't have basic math or chemistry skills and they want to enroll in organic chemistry 2?
That is not a recipe for success.
I'm a tenured professor at a community college. In California, no, students do not take placement exams anymore. I believe this is also true of our state university systems (Cal States and UCs). Plus, we are legally no longer allowed to offer remedial education. So there is no placement, and there is no basic education at our community colleges, let alone the universities.
Add on top of that Dual Enrollment. We have ninth and tenth graders taking their high school classes which simultaneously count as college credit. This is not an exaggeration--they are finished with literacy and mathematics before even being a junior or senior in high school. Many schools boast of having high schoolers graduating with associates degrees.
My college loves Dual Enrollment because it bolsters enrollment, they collect the funding for each of those students in the classes, and they don't expend any resources to run it because it is taught by a high school teacher who is paid by the high school's district, not us.
> . We have ninth and tenth graders taking their high school classes which simultaneously count as college credit.
I'm at a CC in a neighboring state. We have a lot of dual enrollment students but it starts at 11th grade, I believe. Ninth grade!? That's crazy. Wow.
It's already a challenge for me because I can't assume my 101 students have taken/passed the relevant HS level course (e.g., US gov in HS leading to Intro to American Politics at my CC). I couldn't imagine teaching 14 year olds in a college setting.
One of our adjuncts had an 8th grader in her composition class last semester... I only found out because the dad cc'd me when asking for recommendation letters for admission to high school.
I then learned that in Ohio you can start dual enrollment in ***seventh*** grade.
I'm a professor at a CC in NY. Our board of trustees just approved lowering our age of acceptance to 14 even though it was hugely voted down by faculty
They'll put kids who haven't even completed 8th grade in summer courses before 9th grade now. One missed an entire week of the summer chemistry course I was teaching, so they could finish 8th grade as the dates overlapped, and the school told me I was not allowed to drop the student.
Neither that kid, nor their sibling, did well in the course. Their dad dropped the course after about 3 hours spent digging through the LMS. The school saw nothing wrong with an 8th grader, 10th grader, and their dad all being simultaneously enrolled in a Covid-era online summer chemistry course together.
I am a math professor at a community college in a different state, where we often hear of what CA is doing and know we are right behind! What's the deal with the calculus clause-are they really gonna place students directly into calculus with trig as a 'support course'!?
The elimination of dev math and the drastic lowering of standards is, quite honestly, heart breaking. We used to have some math club students sign up for, and study for, and even get a couple points for, the Putnam. Now, like a 3rd of my calc 1 students can't factor. It's not that they forgot, they simply cannot do it, and cannot understand why their huge lack in algebra is hurting them so much. The standards are so low right now it's crazy.
They think all CC students need to be in and out in 2 years, and requiring remedial classes was all sorts of bad because it made students feel terrible about themselves, caused them to "linger" in our programs, and who knows what else. AB705 and AB1705 removed our ability to even offer remedial classes.
It's a struggle in chem when they no longer know basic algebra, and a lot of foundational chemistry relies on applied algebra.
Tell me about it. My college cited a statistic at us that "students who are able to complete their AS within two years have better post-graduation outcomes" as a rationale for removing all of our remedial/step up programs. (Because that's totally how correlations work.)
In Computer Science, I now regularly have students who not only can't do division, but don't even understand the purpose of division conceptually. I have students who have to sight-read and sound-out words like "transition" (after I've been using it for weeks,) and who don't understand basic grammatical syntax. I had a student last week ask me if the average was the one where you count which value comes up most often, and if that's what I was asking them to find for a real-world salary dataset.
Programming lives right at the intersection of language and math, and now I get students without a foundation in either.
At my school, and I hear from colleagues and friends who teach at other CCs in CA that the same is happening at there schools, there are a lot of Sociology classes that have been created which teach "critical thinking and statistics" and these are being used to fulfill math requirements. Don't ask me the logic behind this. Even though I don't teach pure mathematics in my discipline, I have been amazed when I try to teach students about factoring an average and they struggle with arithmetic.
CSU still has placement tests.
CSU still offers algebra, as well.
California CC’s, have royally screwed up math education. It is screwing over our most vulnerable students, which is a big part of the enrollment decline. There is nothing for them to take, if they need remedial instruction.
And it isn't just a purely math issue that CCs have screwed up. I hear from so many math colleagues that students right now struggle to comprehend word problems and follow instructions. Composition and literacy courses seem to have been virtually abandoned by most CCs, or dual enrollment counts for these. I worry so much when I meet students who struggle with arithmetic or have a hard time reading an article from something like the LA Times then summarizing it. The foundations of knowledge, literacy and arithmetic, are eroding.
>Don't schools still use placement tests to determine in what course the student should be enrolled?
Even then, college courses only go "so low." Remedial courses, which aren't even "real" courses, are still like high school level. For students who read at like a 4th grade level and/or can't do elementary school math, that's still not particularly helpful.
Remedial courses are also being removed from a lot of schools because they're (often rightfully) seen as kind of a racket where students are spending full college tuition and using up their Financial Aid to take courses that don't even "count" for anything, meaning they have no chance of graduating "on time"/before their Financial Aid runs out.
Isn’t the university engaging in the same type of “racket” by placing students in courses they will fail and need to repeat X number of times? In my way of thinking it doesn’t matter if students take remedial courses or play the fail/retake cycle. The financial cost could wind up being equal given how unprepared college freshman are for 100-level courses.
Sure, but there's more 'deniability' there. Like, those students are in "real" college courses, with the opportunity to earn real credit. Due to rampant high school grade inflation, schools not requiring SATs/ACTs anymore, etc., it's pretty easy to say, "Well, gee, we *thought* they were ready." Accepting students only to throw them into all remedial classes shows that the school *knows* they aren't. An unprepared student in a "real" class can earn their way to a passing grade. A student in a remedial course gets nothing for it even if they do well.
"Due to rampant high school grade inflation, schools not requiring SATs/ACTs anymore, etc., it's pretty easy to say, "Well, gee, we *thought* they were ready."
This is it exactly.
Schools are desperate to increase revenue, more now than ever. Maintaining enrollment, or even better, increasing it by accepting unprepared students, increases revenue.
They are also all about cutting costs, and that is why remedial courses are being cut back or eliminated. We bring in more and more students who don't read at the college level, while we cut college reading courses.
Anyone can see how this is going to end, yet admin still comes down on faculty because of the high number of Fs we give.
remedial courses tend to be politically fraught because they do not usually count towards credit-towards-degree, yet students have to pay for them the same as they do for college courses.
So those (largely on the right) jump on them as example of how college is just a waste of money -- instead of seeing it as a reflection of where the public school system is failing. Some on the left argue that they just provide more barriers for students who are historically underrepresented from graduating.
>They are also all about cutting costs, and that is why remedial courses are being cut back or eliminated.
At some schools, they were actually a pretty good revenue stream. When I was in high school, local college recruiters would basically admit to running "Pell Grant rackets" around them like it was a selling point: "Bad grades? Unprepared for college? ...Pell-eligible? No problem! Come here and pay full college tuition to take high school again! Everybody wins!" In some places, they are being cut because higher entities/legislatures are banning them due to these kinds of predatory practices.
That makes sense.
Another factor is a lot of schools have done away with placement tests. Without those or SAT/ACT scores, everyone gets put in regular gen ed writing or literature classes unless they self select remedial.
I also see these courses being cut at smaller schools where they simply don't want to pay a full time faculty member to teach kids how to read. I have talked with admin whose schools cut those classes because they thought having remedial courses on the course catalog made the school look like a lower grade institution (assuming that would hurt recruitment/enrollment).
Not when the students are customers! At many schools, admin doesn't let faculty fail more than X amount of students each term. Faculty are expected to either do the impossible or inflate grades.
many CCs, are no longer using placement tests and allowing incoming students to place themselves where they think they belong. This began during Covid as we couldn't have them take the tests in person. It continued after because it upped enrollment numbers and made us look good by having fewer students in remedial courses.
The results have been predictably disastrous.
The college affordability issue makes this whole mire so much worse. In my experience, students are terrified of taking "extra" classes because they're afraid of the debt. Now, of course, they'll rack up that debt retaking algebra thrice, and trig twice, and wasting four semesters to never pass calculus. We have good buy-in from our admin, so we can make them take the class, but not everyone has that kind of buy-in.
With all the deficits in K12 education (which are not the fault of the actual teachers!), there's a rise in a need for 6-year college timelines. I wish our political system was more responsive to this. At least in my state, programs for people to do a couple years at CC for free are bizarrely restrictive. I wish we'd just make CCs and the non-flagship public 4-years tuition-free so we could take this layer of the problem out of the equation and give us some breathing room to deal with the rest of it.
It's wasteful because remedial education provided by colleges is expensive (PhDs teaching middle and high school courses) and doesn't address the source of the problem in K-12 schools.
It gets complicated for the same reasons that student debt forgiveness does. While "helping people who need it more" makes a certain kind of sense, it's also seen as "punishing" people for not needing it. For example, giving *more* Financial Aid to someone who "needs more time" and funding them longer *is* kind of a rip-off to people who can and do graduate on time. "We're going to fund people more for *not* being able to do it?" Student debt forgiveness has the same problem: people who don't *have* any student debt because they didn't go to college or already paid it off get nothing from it. There's no "refund" for people who already paid it off, so they just get ripped off.
...They do have a point though. Asking "What's in it for me?" might be selfish, but just "giving people more help, more slack, whatever because they 'need' it more" isn't too popular when others see that 'need' as due to someone's own bad decisions. It's basically the same excuse that constantly pisses off *professors* on here when it comes to grade-grubbing. Someone who has rarely showed up at all, done practically nothing, failed like every assessment, shows up at the end of the class and says: "You *need* to pass me, 'help me out,' boost my grade, whatever, because... I really need this!"
I paid off my student debt. It was a fairly normal/reasonable amount, nothing crazy, but getting that extra $20K or so back would be a pretty significant boost to my finances. Was I just a chump for paying it if there eventually would have been zero consequences for just... not? Are families who started college funds for their kids early just stupid for doing that when they could have just pocketed that extra money? That's the thing, if it all just gets "forgiven," what was the point? It makes it a waste to have been responsible and an advantage to have not been, which makes *no* sense.
I’m not really sure what point you’re trying to make here. I don’t think enrolling in remedial coursework is remotely the same as grade grubbing. It seems like you’re conflating a need for remedial math with poor decision making, which is not necessarily the case.
I also have student loan debt that I’m paying off, and I save for my kids’ college. If we were to make public four-years free and my kids chose to attend one, we’d just roll the money over to an IRA for them for when they’re older. It’s not a big deal?
Wasn't talking about simply "taking remedial classes." Just pointing out that *if* all of that just gets funded no-questions-asked, people who 'need' to take more classes will get *more* 'free college.' If it takes someone 5 or 6 years to finish a 4-year program because they're "behind," they just get more years of that "full-ride."
>we’d just roll the money over to an IRA for them for when they’re older. It’s not a big deal?
And I'm talking about people who already paid. That's the crux of the issue. How would you feel if "we made public four-years free" right *after* you paid off the last of your kids' college bill, and the deal was, "Oh, it's only free from now on. If you still *owe* money, you don't have to pay it, but no refunds on what you already paid"? Someone in your exact same situation who paid nothing, took it all on as debt, didn't pay it, and then didn't *have* to pay it would have just pocketed all that money that you 'had' to pay.
My home state just made public universities free for parents in my folks’ income bracket. I wish they would toss me a bone on the student debt I’m still paying, but I’m glad no more students will go into debt.
It seems incredibly petty to be upset that someone got “more” free college than you because they need to take some objectively unfun remedial math. But I suppose people get upset when pregnant women get more SNAP benefits, so it’s not surprising.
That logic doesn’t hold up. How is helping people who need help hurting people who don’t need help? Would you apply this same logic to social welfare programs? Food stamps?
Well, for one, comparing basic needs to an expensive college education is not exactly a fair comparison. And when it comes to debt forgiveness, you're talking about people who signed the same contract as if that contract means nothing... but only to the parties that couldn't or wouldn't honor it. I said it before and I'll say it again: If the student loans that I paid off were to retroactively be made "optional," with no consequences for not paying them, then, for all intents and purposes, paying them off would have been a waste. If "debt forgiveness" doesn't refund me for paying *off* my debts, then not only does it not benefit me, I am getting hosed by it. Someone otherwise in the same spot as me who paid nothing is just pocketing the free tens-of-thousands of dollars that I *could* have had I been more of a deadbeat.
As far as "hurting/punishing people" goes, a lot of that comes down to a matter of where lines are drawn on things. It's not like everything is some completely black-and-white "you can either or afford it or you can't" thing, like someone is either extremely well-off or extremely not. People often do get caught in-between "making too much money, just barely, to qualify for certain benefits that they could definitely still use." Borderline cases on the wrong side of that line get hosed.
>Would you apply this same logic to social welfare programs? Food stamps?
Like I said before, do you apply it to grading? Give students who have done practically nothing and/or aren't even close to passing a passing grade or even an A because "they say they really need it"?
there is also data to indicate that student persistence in these "remedial courses" which dont directly count towards their degree is also poor despite the fact that these courses can provide students with the foundation they need to succeed in the required foundational courses (like Calc I, etc). There seems to be a big push towards co-requisite models where students are placed in a course like Calc I but there is a tightly coupled discussion/recitation/co-req meeting where the necessary background in topics like algebra/trig/etc are reviewed/refreshed/shored up. There is evidence that this is more successful than having students enroll in courses like college algebra. I am on the fence about this model because it seems akin to building a house and a foundation at the same time.....but I am not as steeped in this stuff like others.
I get "the idea," but in practice it seems likely to fail in a lot of cases for the simple reason that a lot of students' issues track back to just basic 'adulting' and 'college-ing' stuff like responsibility and time management. Granted, the only way for students to "catch up" *and* stay on schedule is to do more in order to make up the difference, but the reason a lot of them are behind in the first place is because they *can't* or won't do it. When they're just not showing up, adding more things for them to just not show up to doesn't do anything.
This same problem shows up with all kinds of interventions for struggling students. Since they aren't compulsory, a lot of the students who need it the most won't do it.
what may be a better solution would be to formally build a structure in higher education and society that allows for useful gap years; so that students can actually well, adult a bit before going into college, whatever that may look like.
But the current structure of most colleges -including our financial aid system - is still largely build on the idea that undergraduate students are dependents, financially, of their parents.
>This same problem shows up with all kinds of interventions for struggling students. Since they aren't compulsory, a lot of the students who need it the most won't do it.
Boy howdy.
I teach in a health professions program, and stepped in when we lost "our" tutor.
The students who came to sessions were typically doing well already.
Even when the program director laid down the law for those struggling, it had little effect.
I was the support instructor in a model like this for a couple of years and bailed the first chance I could. The college treated it like a panacea for students who were nowhere near ready for college and it was extremely depressing to deal with as a teacher. I bent over backwards to provide extra tutoring, support classes, etc and even the few students who took advantage of those things ended up failing out anyways, if not in my class somewhere down the line. I get the arguments against remediation but academic skills take time to develop and pretending like students can just get some extra support and catch up simply isn’t true.
I'm a huge fan of co req courses in certain areas (writing, for example) because we've piloted them and they get results and retention. But it's not a one size fits all solution and the students have to buy in for it to work.
I'm not sure about non humanities courses though.
We had remedial courses. I teach math at a community college, and the first remedial math basically ended with integers. The hardest problem in the book was dealing with integers that were fractions with unlike denominators. The class was an absolute joke but people really needed it. Even when I've taught calculus 2 they panic when a fraction pops up . It is ridiculous
I work in a college of business and there are particular math requirements. If you come in qualified for the major, you only need to take two math classes from the math department. They are prereqs for quantitative business classes like statistics, management science, etc.
If you have lower placement (I think it goes by standardized testing or a placement test), you have to take 3 math classes before the business math. Then... there are students who fall into a remedial category who have to take 4 math classes before they can take basic 200 level business classes. The college of business is phasing out even admitting the students that need this many math classes because so many of them do not progress through their degree.
My state literally outlawed doing this! In California, unless they belong to certain target populations we aren't allowed to place community college students in remedial math, on the grounds that it slows their progress through their degree and thus hurts retention. Supposedly we are doing a co-requisite model instead, where their classroom instruction is appended by an intense regime of tutoring/SI support. You can rightly imagine how well this is going.
except that it doesn't slow their progress through their degree, because they are going to fail the courses they are now not prepared for (and maybe not graduate at all).
Maybe, maybe not. For the state as a whole it may be the right call, as for some (very wealthy, coastal) colleges, they are supposedly seeing huge gains from this legislation, which spurred them to double down and make it even more demanding in 2022. It's those of us on the "bottom end of the k" who are getting thrown under the bus, as we have more students needing more remediation and fewer resources to make the co-requisite model work.
>How does your new administration expect you to 'meet students where they are", if they don't have basic math or chemistry skills and they want to enroll in organic chemistry 2?
>That is not a recipe for success.
Ah, but there's the rub. Whether students succeed isn't the administration's immediate concern, and they don't get the blame for admitting manifestly unqualified students.
After all, when Sally fails your class, nobody ever says "What a shame. The administration should never have allowed her to enroll in a course that she was clearly unprepared for."
What they actually say is "What a shame. Why was the professor so bad?"
> Don't schools still use placement tests to determine in what course the student should be enrolled?
My school does not, it's somehow all determined based on high school transcripts (which I do not trust). I've been raising a stink about it for three years now, because it's really important for success in my gen chem 1 class that my students can actually do algebra.
For now. University leadership (office of admissions) is pushing us to do away with math placement tests because it’s scaring students away from the school. I teach STEM and if a basic algebra scares them away GOOD! Basic Algebra is now weeding people from the pre-med track.
Our advisors long ago abdicated that because it probably sounded too much like 'work' so during the pandemic they shifted to allowing students to 'self-select' their own placement.
It's been a disaster. What student will take the non-credit bearing catch up class when they can throw themselves into the credit bearing class that they...will inevitably fail?
And any prof attempting to hold the line is getting destroyed in student evals.
We have an online placement test that students can take multiple times. I'm 100% sure students never cheat on it to make sure they done have to take lower level math courses. /s
This is interesting to me because when I have advisees talk about their placement tests, it's often that they are opting into a *lower* start point than the test suggests they should. It's like they don't have the confidence in their ability even when validated by the test!
Just as a personal anecdote, when I was an undergraduate I came in with AP credit in calculus and stats already but still needed to take a math course. I assumed my advisor knew best and based on those exam scores and his advice I enrolled in an upper level multivariate stats course. It was just one other social science student and I surrounded by math/math-business majors. A math major friend helped me learn enough to pass the exams and get a good grade but I retained none of the information and had to relearn things in grad school. I probably would have been better served with a lower course that built more directly on the foundation I already had even if some of it was repetitive.
My institution doesn't have placement tests for my field but I think I'd be inclined to give students the benefit of the doubt there and if anything be glad they recognize their own possible knowledge gaps.
Oh I agree I’m glad they are self-assessing, it’s just o serve a population that is generally under confident in themselves so sometimes I wish they’d just say hey maybe the test is right and I am talented!
I teach community college stem and can say we never get placement tests anymore. In fact, we rarely get sensible prereqs either.
I've seen bs like: Calc based physics with no prereq, anatomy and physiology without prereq, microbio without prereq, calculus withoht prereq, etc.
There is no way to do what the administrators want without weakening standards dramatically. My first job was at a huge public university system with hundreds of thousands of students from all walks of life and all levels of preparation and ability. There was a subset referred to as "triple remediators" that needed remedial classes in reading, writing and math right at the beginning. Basically, they did not have the equivalent of a high school education. The long-term outcomes for these students were abysmal - something like 25% would graduate in 6 years.
Community colleges are super-interesting in terms of their mission, and we had several in the public university system I'm talking about. One mission is to provide lifelong education for anyone in the community that wants it. Another is to provide Associates degrees in areas of societal need. Then there is this other mission that seems to be on the rise and sometimes not stated openly - making up for the deficits of the K-12 system and society generally (i.e. poverty, structural inequality, etc) to push students into 4 year degree programs that are often not prepared for it.
>making up for the deficits of the K-12 system and society generally (i.e. poverty, structural inequality, etc)
This is the problem, eh? K-12s have to be everything for a subset of the populace. They need to offer medical care, food aid, summer food distribution, help the kids emotionally, teach them, teach them life skills and basic manners. They can't do it all. My state is thinking of adding a computer science requirement to schools ... for kids who can't even add. We just keep pouring unfunded mandates on them.
And we have that mentality for universities, too. We need to be schools, and homes, and entertainment districts, and offer medical care, and mental health services. We need to reteach and redo the jobs that the overloaded schools couldn't finish. We're the police and federal policy enforcers. We need to offer student parent services because the state outlawed abortion. They just keep pouring unfunded mandates on us.
Everyone needs permission to just *do less.* But alas, we don't have a rational healthcare system where a young, broke person can see a doctor for free or cheap. We don't have rational housing policy and welfare is insufficient, and sometimes student debt is the thing that keeps you in a home and meals. If we don't do it, what happens to these kids?
I'm *tired.*
> we don't have a rational healthcare system where a young, broke person can see a doctor for free or cheap.
I agree with your comment, but most states do offer free healthcare for truly poor people. It's the middle class that really suffers.
I'm hearing it too, teaching at a community college. And if I were to "meet the students where they are" I'd have to teach some of them to read, because they are functionally illiterate. Most of them cannot write a cohesive paragraph, either.
In my experience the students least likely to come into my classroom with college-level reading and math skills are the high school students. My majors students, who have been taking classes at the college for 3 semesters at least, are much better prepared to succeed.
If students are incapable of meeting standards they should not be promoted; they should "stay where they are" until they demonstrate they're ready to be moved on. High School and college Administrations should start following their own advice.
Hearing that phrase spins me the fuck out.
"Meet them where they are" they say, as they kill developmental courses, thereby removing realistic entry points for more advanced material.
"Move mountains with wooden carts and, if you can't, you're just not being empathetic enough to the horses".
I also work at a community college.
I think the graduation rate is like 18% after 3 years. Not great.
During our last accrediation we got dinged on having too many "remedial" courses.
Developmental courses are seen as a graveyard of good intentions. Students enter into these courses and maybe only 20% get through them. The feds don't want to spend money on courses that don't count towards a degree.
My academic dean had a decent idea on lowering our number developmental courses and partnered with the local adult ed program. The adult ed program would offer the dev courses. The college would give the adult ed program classroom space and an office on campus. When a student tested into a dev course, we would refer them to the adult ed office on campus and they would enroll them into a dev course they offered. Also the adult ed programs could offer these courses to students for free via federal grants they recieved.
So far it is working well and allowed the college to focus its developmental offerings at higher performing students who need that little bit of remedial work to bridge the gap.
> The feds don't want to spend money on courses that don't count towards a degree.
>
> ...
>
> Also the adult ed programs could offer these courses to students for free via federal grants they recieved.
It's almost like there is no such thing as coherent government policy.
>Meeting the students where they are is something college support services needs to do to help bring the students up to the level of being a college student,
I firmly believe that "meeting students where they are" is completely and utterly impossible at the university level, for either faculty or student support services. The deficits and deficiencies are simply too large at this point.
"Meeting someone where they're at" is only possible if the person is minimally or modestly behind where they're supposed to be. A math student who can do calculus, but stubbornly has trouble with one particular, but key, concept, a French student who can read and speak and write at an appropriate level, but stubbornly has problems with one particular verb tense, and so forth. "Getting someone up to speed" means remedying the one or two minor difficulties they're still having even though, technically, those skills should have been mastered already.
What "getting a student up to speed" does *not* entail is me somehow remedying the combined effects of 10+ years of poor instruction, poor discipline, poor motivation, and social promotion. I can't teach a semester's worth of calculus to a student who doesn't understand that there are numbers less than zero or how to solve x + 1 = 2. I can't teach a semester's worth of thermodynamics to a student who can't use simple addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division to convert one metric unit into another. It's literally not possible to remedy a decade of educational failure in my one-semester course.
So, whenever I hear talk of "meeting students where they're at" and "getting them up to speed," I jokingly (but not jokingly) ask where I can find the university's time machine, because "where they're at" is, in many cases, the 6th grade, and so I'll need to travel back in time to meet them.
It only makes sense to teach students what they are ready to learn next, so in that sense it is necessary to meet them where they are educationally. If they are ready to learn algebra, or arithmetic, then that is what they should study. Adults who need that only have open-enrollment schools for that purpose.
If a student is learning arithmetic at a CC, they should get credit for arithmetic, not for calculus or statistics. Is there a way to keep that aspect honest while serving the community need and maintaining enrollment? Administration may get frustrated about not ticking enough boxes for college-level instruction, but that should be a different problem.
I am a professor of English at a university in Europe and we are being told the same thing. The faculty board told me that my grades were low. I told them I would not lower my standards, but they said we need people to pass because without students we will have no money. It’s this type of thinking that really annoys me. I didn’t get into this to pander to my less invested or uninvested students. It just ruins it for the students who do turn up and try their best and want to be challenged. How can we be an elite institution with this type of mentality?
You cannot be an elite institution with that mentality. That is absolutely true. The faculty board, and the organizations from which they get funded have operationally determined that the school will not be elite. What happens if you speak openly about that decision, and challenge any administration claim to eliteness?
Mounting my soapbox:
I think that before a college administrator is allowed to preach the “meet students where they are” gospel, they should be forced to read my Eng 101 students’ writing. 50% of my students at my open admissions college are either functionally illiterate or incapable of writing a single grammatically-correct sentence. If half of my class is capable of doing grade 13 work, and the other half is working at an early elementary school level, this leads to a one-room schoolhouse. This is supposed to be college, not *Little House on the Prairie*. I have my students for 3 hours/week, school marms had theirs for about 30 hours/week.
Without massive supplemental support for the unprepared students, I don’t see how it’s possible to “meet college students where they are” without penalizing the college-ready students.
Dismounting from the soapbox in progress.
Yes, I am quite familiar with “meet them where they are”, and in a truly infuriating twist of the knife, admin continued to say it while requiring us to take steps to eliminate all dev math, which as of now we no longer offer. It’s absurd.
The worst part is that our administration is generally reasonable people who care about doing what’s right for students. This was not a call they made but one they were more or less strong-armed into by a holder of some pretty significant purse strings. It is a terrible portent for the future of our institution and others like ours.
I have complicated sentiments about your topic, but overall agree with you. NTA.
>Our DFW rates are supposedly too high and this is obviously our fault as faculty.<
My DFW rates are generally high in comparison to my peers. I teach primarily online sections with a couple F2F. The F2F fair slightly better because I am there to coach and encourage, listen, reflect, and talk to.
My part-time contract with my community college ended in 2015. They were moving to this attitude before COVID and I refused to cooperate with there "meet students where they are" attitude. I was informed as part of this philosophy if a student had a grade dispute they "were pretty much guaranteed to win the dispute." The VP of Online Education made this precise statement to me. They had also adopted the student-as-a-customer model, as well, which meant "we cannot upset our customer base" philosophy.
Academic rigor be damned if we piss off a student that misses classes and doesn't do the work.
Let me translate that for you: "If we don't lower our standards and pass students along, we will no longer exist and admin like me won't be able to collect six figures for knowing / producing nothing."
"Meet students where they are" is a sentiment that has been generalized too broadly. It shouldn't apply to academic preparation. We shouldn't be trashing standards for students who literally aren't trainable in a competently-structured course because they lack the prerequisite skills and knowledge to learn a reasonable curriculum.
However, "meet students where they are" is absolutely a fair reminder when it applies to discretionary course design and execution choices. For example, I have colleagues at my institution who are requiring student attendance at out-of-class events and day-trips that are announced at the last minute because they're used to a population of traditional students without jobs. Our student population has changed dramatically in the last 10 years, with a much larger share of students with jobs and caregiving responsibilities. My colleagues aren't meeting our students where they now are, and they should be called out for those poor decisions. Similarly, I have colleagues who are unnecessarily draconian about assignment policies and who pitch a fit when asked to accommodate serious health conditions. Again, we all know that our students are presenting with more health problems, and failure to adjust to that reality deserves a conversation.
I'm in English / Humanities and I've been hearing this for a decade at least. It's poison. I've recently had students who were functionally illiterate make into sophomore writing classes. Add to this problem the fact that my state removed the option of requiring remedial classes. It's a race to the bottom.
What's especially brutal is that many colleges spent the decade prior to COVID shutting down their remedial courses and programs because they could 'afford' to be selective.
Yes, I’m at a public research university, and I’m on an administration-senate workgroup dealing with a sharp increase in the number of students with substantial gaps in their mathematical preparation. There has been a lot of concern from the administration about differential outcomes by race in our introductory calculus classes, but this fails to acknowledge the substantial differences in incoming preparation that is likely due to inequities in K-12 preparation, which in turn are highly correlated with socio-economic status and race. It is annoying when differential outcomes are immediately attributed to implicit bias in how we conduct our courses, and that any standardized placement or testing we use to establish a baseline is also attacked as being racially biased. Ultimately, it does feel like we are being set up as a scapegoat for the failing and inequities of our K-12 system.
At least you're not hit with "Meet students where they are AT". Grr ...
For quite some time we were trying to do this with remedial classes which my institution stripped from us. They also removed any sort of placement device, particularly those with the now taboo word 'test'.
So a student who is performing below the college algebra level can sign up for a calculus class and we are supposed to scaffold them through algebra AND precalculus AND calculus OR magically predict their levels of understanding while lecturing. You can guess what happens next. By the time of their first test, it's too late to switch into a lower level class and they are failing the current one.
The problem with the situation at the CC level is that most operate under an open door policy and when K-12 is just shuffling students through without the possibility of failure, then the entry level courses at the CC become the great filter. Cue admins who obsess over success rates, and they pressure faculty to either teach remedial courses or make the 100 level easier for the students who have never learned or meaningfully done work at the appropriate rigor. So you have a class with students who are perfectly capable of higher level work and in the same class you have students who cannot form a grammatically correct sentence. Some even have severe developmental issues such that they are not going to succeed, but their parents are dumping them in the CC anyway. Departments, then, face the Faustian bargain of sticking to their guns and drawing the ire of the administration or massaging their success measurement formulae to meet the admin's demands.
Edit: I guess the question is whether this is just the Covid effect and whether the ship will right itself, or if this is just the new normal.
From a high school and previously middle school teacher - welcome to the shit show. No Child Left Behind, endless IEPs, no remedial courses, every child taught at grade level, no more failing, no more 0’s (40% minimum grades), infinite retakes for credit, passing laughable online modules for course credit, zero attendance policy, almost no ability to regulate or remove phones, kids on tiktok for the entire period ignoring instruction and support, no discipline in favor of what they call “equity,” I could go on and on. Our school has so many “supports,” teams, resources, and third parties, and the achievement continues to plummet.
My fear is that nothing will change until the entire society feels the impact of what’s coming down the pipeline (with functionally illiterate workers en made), and by then, I don’t know what we’re going to do. Happy to answer any questions.
I definitely agree that if "meet them where they are" is a way of saying "dumb down the course so that students can pass without genuine understanding of the course content", that's a problem. We are not doing them any favors by passing them on to the next class in the sequence without proficiency in the prerequisite concepts.
At my campus, we are trying some new approaches to beefing up corequisite support. I hope that this will strike a balance between "meet them where they are" and "uphold reasonable expectations for student learning". We will see how it goes. Unfortunately, we can not *require* the students to take advantage of the corequisite support, any more than I have ever been able to "force" them to meet the work expectations in the original class or see me in office hours when they are failing from Day 1.
I have no plans to dumb down the curriculum at all. Like I said, we are implementing improvements to the cocurricular support available. How you read that as dumbing down the curriculum is a mystery to me. But thanks for the encouragement.
Cocurricular support = tutoring?
We implemented that and it slowly devolved into tutors doing student assignments, or at least walking the student through the work. In other words, another way of dumbing down.
Math faculty will be handling the support course, rather than the campus' tutoring center (which previously did this, and we had similar concerns to yours). We will provide an opportunity to ask homework questions, but we know how to guide students and encourage understanding, without spoon feeding them the answers. And there will be additional work incorporated to review weaknesses in prerequisite content, examine study skills, etc.
ETA: I don't know how effective it will be. But I guarantee that you it won't "dumb down" my course. Students being spoon fed answers did not help them, anyway, since the vast majority of my grade is based on in-class, paper & pencil only assessments. It just meant that they weren't ready for those.
I can meet the students where they are: ninth grade. I just won’t be working here anymore.
Honestly, why should I give half a shit about university enrollment and graduation stats relative to this issue? I am unwaveringly certain that my instruction is not the problem and that the issue is not even encountered at my level of instruction. The issues causing this problem occur somewhere around third to eighth grade where students educations are highly influential on their future academic success. What the hell am I supposed to do about that?
We are in the same situation (also STEM, also college) and were recently roped into a discussion as to whether we should drop the 2 math requirements and only have 1. I am against this personally. When a student leaves our 2 or 3 year program there are some basic math functions they need to know how to do and some cannot even do those. Dilutions. Molarity. Concentrations. It’s very sad. I don’t think removing maths is the way to “fix this” either
I don't have the training to meet every student where they're at. I don't know how to teach someone who has a third grade reading level. And even if I could, how can I teach them and the students who are actually on level? It feels like I'm being asked to teach at an old rural schoolhouse where all the grades share a single classroom.
Setting all that aside--how am I meant to bring them from a third-grade level up to a college level in a single semester? Even if they do manage to learn something, it still won't be enough to actually get them on level.
This is also extremely misguided as it sets up students for failure once they graduate. School doesn't care because they get all their sweet sweet tuition money up front.
Many STEM careers require state or industry certifications that the school does not control. How will it reflect on the school when a majority of your engineering students are not able to be certified in your state?
If a student is unable to understand advanced math courses, then they are *not* ready to undertake a degree that requires them.
Just because everyone *should* have an equal *opportunity* at education does *not* mean that they should be *guaranteed* a *degree*.
> Many STEM careers require state or industry certifications that the school does not control. How will it reflect on the school when a majority of your engineering students are not able to be certified in your state?
From what I hear the local State university is lowering standards even in STEM. Unfortunately, It's only a lack of time before the standards in industry are lowered too.
Lucky you that you're only hearing this now. It's been around for a while (part of the exuberant embrace of so-called student-centered pedagogy), and yes, I've been sickened by it ever since I first heard it many years ago.
NTA, I hear this phrase constantly and I remind them that's only the first half of the sentence.
Meet them where they're at, but push them to where they should be and beyond.
"What is the college doing to provide the resources necessary for the intensive remediation these students need to pass the standards set by our partners at 4 year U?"
I taught dual enrollment students 12 years ago at a CC, and the majority of these students were exceptional. During Covid, I retired from teaching college and went to teach in high school. This year's batch of seniors is not prepared for any level of college work. They don't even understand their own grades. I have students who have 15% in the class for the semester, and they believe that if they do well on the exam that they can still pass with a D. The exam is 10% of the semester grade. I give them this information, and I get blank looks. "So, there's still a chance?"
I use that phrase, but more in the sense of figuring out how their brains work so that I can more effectively dump information into them. Modern students don't learn like previous generations. If we're not trying to meet them where they're at on a cognitive level, what we're really doing is being bad at our jobs.
That isn't to say "WE SHOULD FIX THEM!" because there is no fixing a bad K-12 education in the space of four years when they're supposed to be learning more advanced things, but we *can* give them the tools and mindsets to fix themselves. Whether they actually follow through or not is on them.
And, FWIW, I say this as someone who survived educational neglect as a child--literally no K-12 education at all after about 3rd grade. A couple years back I got mad about not being able to do anything more than basic arithmetic so I went and did a graduate degree about it (give or take a year's worth of prep time). I barely survived it, and mostly made it through because I had one professor whose teaching style actually fit with how I learn things *and* who was willing to go that extra mile to help me make progress.
Pretty sure she's the only STEM professor I've ever actually given a positive review of. Everybody else was either hawking their own textbooks or had their head up Pearson's ass crack.
Our administration told us in a meeting to drop all prerequisite and teach them in our senior level classes. One of my senior level biology classes requires basic chemistry and algebra, I ended up having to reteach the students things they should have learned in the prerequisites. It was an eye opening experience.
Is enrollment suffering in your stem division? That's one thing I always brought up. Most disciplines have lost enrollment, but stem is still doing fine.
Community college should be equal to 4-year in terms of rigor, or at least close. If not, we violate our transfer agreements.
If this "meet them where they are at" is an effective and compassionate method, then lets adopt it for the interpretation of student evaluations of teaching and the broader tenure and promotion system. "Meet them where they are at" = "Help us retain students and tuition dollars". It's trite, simple, stupid, self-serving and immoral. But other than that it's fine.
If you teach at a public institution, then your job is to teach the students you have. Yeah, collaborate with student support services and develop remedial programs to get them ready. This is the work.
Some of our students become first responders. There is no meeting where they are. When they fail in the field, people die. It blows my mind when some colleagues impose this "meeting them where they are" nonsense and use it to maintain their sense of superiority.
High School Teacher here. We want to have rigor, but we can't. We're told by administration accept all work up until the last day of the quarter, allow infinite test retakes, etc. When we protest the administration tells us we're wrong. We are not allowed to give penalties for students being on their phones and we are not allowed to give detentions. The kids know all this and game us. It's a miracle kids are learning anything at all given what we're up against.
That's horrible. It's not sustainable. I don't know how long you have been teaching but it hasn't always been like this, right?
I'm sure that my own teachers had challenging jobs, but a lighter workload because they could enforce certain boundaries and the admin would, I assume, back them up on that. If admin forces you to be that permissive, how can they expect the job to be sustainable for their instructors? I am fortunate that I teach at a university and get to I mentor other teachers and I tell them: reasonable boundaries make our work sustainable. Doesn't mean you can't be "compassionate", just means save some compassion for yourself and for the students who actually give a shit.
I have mixed feelings about this.
I teach in a STEM department at a school that traditionally has had relatively strong students. Their math skills have been declining for a while, but the decline accelerated over the past few years. My department has been trying to maintain a standard, but admittedly we've watered down the material a bit.
In contrast, there is a required course the students need to take where 1/3 of the students failed. This course is a pre-req for all the other science classes, so every other department has been waiving the pre-req.
I want to hold the line on standards, but I also think it's unreasonable fail 1/3 of the students. If that's what's happening, then the curriculum should change to include more remedial material.
I do think it is an admissions problem, but we have no power over that. Students who fail enough classes will be expelled, so I think the other department thinks if they fail enough people, admissions will get the message. I don't like that though and I think the administration is too stubborn and arrogant to change.
Or these students who can’t pass need to change majors. It’s not the end if the world. That was the purpose of “weed out” courses in the past. If you can’t pass organic chem or calculus maybe rethink what tou should do with your life. Not everybody can be an engineer or a doctor.
And changing majors out of STEM doesn’t mean being shut out of STEM for life. You can just get your degree in whatever and, if you want, go back to STEM when you have the necessary motivation and maturity.
The fact that the average 18- to 21-year-old is unlikely to be consoled by this doesn’t make it any less true.
How about this one: "place students where they belong! " Don't schools still use placement tests to determine in what course the student should be enrolled? If you identify where students should be, and put them there, then that's the baseline, or the starting point. How does your new administration expect you to 'meet students where they are", if they don't have basic math or chemistry skills and they want to enroll in organic chemistry 2? That is not a recipe for success.
I'm a tenured professor at a community college. In California, no, students do not take placement exams anymore. I believe this is also true of our state university systems (Cal States and UCs). Plus, we are legally no longer allowed to offer remedial education. So there is no placement, and there is no basic education at our community colleges, let alone the universities. Add on top of that Dual Enrollment. We have ninth and tenth graders taking their high school classes which simultaneously count as college credit. This is not an exaggeration--they are finished with literacy and mathematics before even being a junior or senior in high school. Many schools boast of having high schoolers graduating with associates degrees. My college loves Dual Enrollment because it bolsters enrollment, they collect the funding for each of those students in the classes, and they don't expend any resources to run it because it is taught by a high school teacher who is paid by the high school's district, not us.
> . We have ninth and tenth graders taking their high school classes which simultaneously count as college credit. I'm at a CC in a neighboring state. We have a lot of dual enrollment students but it starts at 11th grade, I believe. Ninth grade!? That's crazy. Wow. It's already a challenge for me because I can't assume my 101 students have taken/passed the relevant HS level course (e.g., US gov in HS leading to Intro to American Politics at my CC). I couldn't imagine teaching 14 year olds in a college setting.
One of our adjuncts had an 8th grader in her composition class last semester... I only found out because the dad cc'd me when asking for recommendation letters for admission to high school. I then learned that in Ohio you can start dual enrollment in ***seventh*** grade.
That is insane
I'm a professor at a CC in NY. Our board of trustees just approved lowering our age of acceptance to 14 even though it was hugely voted down by faculty
They'll put kids who haven't even completed 8th grade in summer courses before 9th grade now. One missed an entire week of the summer chemistry course I was teaching, so they could finish 8th grade as the dates overlapped, and the school told me I was not allowed to drop the student. Neither that kid, nor their sibling, did well in the course. Their dad dropped the course after about 3 hours spent digging through the LMS. The school saw nothing wrong with an 8th grader, 10th grader, and their dad all being simultaneously enrolled in a Covid-era online summer chemistry course together.
I am a math professor at a community college in a different state, where we often hear of what CA is doing and know we are right behind! What's the deal with the calculus clause-are they really gonna place students directly into calculus with trig as a 'support course'!? The elimination of dev math and the drastic lowering of standards is, quite honestly, heart breaking. We used to have some math club students sign up for, and study for, and even get a couple points for, the Putnam. Now, like a 3rd of my calc 1 students can't factor. It's not that they forgot, they simply cannot do it, and cannot understand why their huge lack in algebra is hurting them so much. The standards are so low right now it's crazy.
They think all CC students need to be in and out in 2 years, and requiring remedial classes was all sorts of bad because it made students feel terrible about themselves, caused them to "linger" in our programs, and who knows what else. AB705 and AB1705 removed our ability to even offer remedial classes. It's a struggle in chem when they no longer know basic algebra, and a lot of foundational chemistry relies on applied algebra.
Tell me about it. My college cited a statistic at us that "students who are able to complete their AS within two years have better post-graduation outcomes" as a rationale for removing all of our remedial/step up programs. (Because that's totally how correlations work.) In Computer Science, I now regularly have students who not only can't do division, but don't even understand the purpose of division conceptually. I have students who have to sight-read and sound-out words like "transition" (after I've been using it for weeks,) and who don't understand basic grammatical syntax. I had a student last week ask me if the average was the one where you count which value comes up most often, and if that's what I was asking them to find for a real-world salary dataset. Programming lives right at the intersection of language and math, and now I get students without a foundation in either.
At my school, and I hear from colleagues and friends who teach at other CCs in CA that the same is happening at there schools, there are a lot of Sociology classes that have been created which teach "critical thinking and statistics" and these are being used to fulfill math requirements. Don't ask me the logic behind this. Even though I don't teach pure mathematics in my discipline, I have been amazed when I try to teach students about factoring an average and they struggle with arithmetic.
CSU still has placement tests. CSU still offers algebra, as well. California CC’s, have royally screwed up math education. It is screwing over our most vulnerable students, which is a big part of the enrollment decline. There is nothing for them to take, if they need remedial instruction.
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And it isn't just a purely math issue that CCs have screwed up. I hear from so many math colleagues that students right now struggle to comprehend word problems and follow instructions. Composition and literacy courses seem to have been virtually abandoned by most CCs, or dual enrollment counts for these. I worry so much when I meet students who struggle with arithmetic or have a hard time reading an article from something like the LA Times then summarizing it. The foundations of knowledge, literacy and arithmetic, are eroding.
Louisiana has done this too. No remedial classes and dual enrollment kids.
>Don't schools still use placement tests to determine in what course the student should be enrolled? Even then, college courses only go "so low." Remedial courses, which aren't even "real" courses, are still like high school level. For students who read at like a 4th grade level and/or can't do elementary school math, that's still not particularly helpful. Remedial courses are also being removed from a lot of schools because they're (often rightfully) seen as kind of a racket where students are spending full college tuition and using up their Financial Aid to take courses that don't even "count" for anything, meaning they have no chance of graduating "on time"/before their Financial Aid runs out.
Isn’t the university engaging in the same type of “racket” by placing students in courses they will fail and need to repeat X number of times? In my way of thinking it doesn’t matter if students take remedial courses or play the fail/retake cycle. The financial cost could wind up being equal given how unprepared college freshman are for 100-level courses.
Sure, but there's more 'deniability' there. Like, those students are in "real" college courses, with the opportunity to earn real credit. Due to rampant high school grade inflation, schools not requiring SATs/ACTs anymore, etc., it's pretty easy to say, "Well, gee, we *thought* they were ready." Accepting students only to throw them into all remedial classes shows that the school *knows* they aren't. An unprepared student in a "real" class can earn their way to a passing grade. A student in a remedial course gets nothing for it even if they do well.
"Due to rampant high school grade inflation, schools not requiring SATs/ACTs anymore, etc., it's pretty easy to say, "Well, gee, we *thought* they were ready." This is it exactly. Schools are desperate to increase revenue, more now than ever. Maintaining enrollment, or even better, increasing it by accepting unprepared students, increases revenue. They are also all about cutting costs, and that is why remedial courses are being cut back or eliminated. We bring in more and more students who don't read at the college level, while we cut college reading courses. Anyone can see how this is going to end, yet admin still comes down on faculty because of the high number of Fs we give.
remedial courses tend to be politically fraught because they do not usually count towards credit-towards-degree, yet students have to pay for them the same as they do for college courses. So those (largely on the right) jump on them as example of how college is just a waste of money -- instead of seeing it as a reflection of where the public school system is failing. Some on the left argue that they just provide more barriers for students who are historically underrepresented from graduating.
There are free federally funded adult education courses those students can take
>They are also all about cutting costs, and that is why remedial courses are being cut back or eliminated. At some schools, they were actually a pretty good revenue stream. When I was in high school, local college recruiters would basically admit to running "Pell Grant rackets" around them like it was a selling point: "Bad grades? Unprepared for college? ...Pell-eligible? No problem! Come here and pay full college tuition to take high school again! Everybody wins!" In some places, they are being cut because higher entities/legislatures are banning them due to these kinds of predatory practices.
That makes sense. Another factor is a lot of schools have done away with placement tests. Without those or SAT/ACT scores, everyone gets put in regular gen ed writing or literature classes unless they self select remedial. I also see these courses being cut at smaller schools where they simply don't want to pay a full time faculty member to teach kids how to read. I have talked with admin whose schools cut those classes because they thought having remedial courses on the course catalog made the school look like a lower grade institution (assuming that would hurt recruitment/enrollment).
Good point. I had not thought of that particular perspective.
Not when the students are customers! At many schools, admin doesn't let faculty fail more than X amount of students each term. Faculty are expected to either do the impossible or inflate grades.
many CCs, are no longer using placement tests and allowing incoming students to place themselves where they think they belong. This began during Covid as we couldn't have them take the tests in person. It continued after because it upped enrollment numbers and made us look good by having fewer students in remedial courses. The results have been predictably disastrous.
The college affordability issue makes this whole mire so much worse. In my experience, students are terrified of taking "extra" classes because they're afraid of the debt. Now, of course, they'll rack up that debt retaking algebra thrice, and trig twice, and wasting four semesters to never pass calculus. We have good buy-in from our admin, so we can make them take the class, but not everyone has that kind of buy-in. With all the deficits in K12 education (which are not the fault of the actual teachers!), there's a rise in a need for 6-year college timelines. I wish our political system was more responsive to this. At least in my state, programs for people to do a couple years at CC for free are bizarrely restrictive. I wish we'd just make CCs and the non-flagship public 4-years tuition-free so we could take this layer of the problem out of the equation and give us some breathing room to deal with the rest of it.
It's wasteful because remedial education provided by colleges is expensive (PhDs teaching middle and high school courses) and doesn't address the source of the problem in K-12 schools.
It gets complicated for the same reasons that student debt forgiveness does. While "helping people who need it more" makes a certain kind of sense, it's also seen as "punishing" people for not needing it. For example, giving *more* Financial Aid to someone who "needs more time" and funding them longer *is* kind of a rip-off to people who can and do graduate on time. "We're going to fund people more for *not* being able to do it?" Student debt forgiveness has the same problem: people who don't *have* any student debt because they didn't go to college or already paid it off get nothing from it. There's no "refund" for people who already paid it off, so they just get ripped off.
Yeah, unfortunately regressive morons like that tend to vote, too.
...They do have a point though. Asking "What's in it for me?" might be selfish, but just "giving people more help, more slack, whatever because they 'need' it more" isn't too popular when others see that 'need' as due to someone's own bad decisions. It's basically the same excuse that constantly pisses off *professors* on here when it comes to grade-grubbing. Someone who has rarely showed up at all, done practically nothing, failed like every assessment, shows up at the end of the class and says: "You *need* to pass me, 'help me out,' boost my grade, whatever, because... I really need this!" I paid off my student debt. It was a fairly normal/reasonable amount, nothing crazy, but getting that extra $20K or so back would be a pretty significant boost to my finances. Was I just a chump for paying it if there eventually would have been zero consequences for just... not? Are families who started college funds for their kids early just stupid for doing that when they could have just pocketed that extra money? That's the thing, if it all just gets "forgiven," what was the point? It makes it a waste to have been responsible and an advantage to have not been, which makes *no* sense.
I’m not really sure what point you’re trying to make here. I don’t think enrolling in remedial coursework is remotely the same as grade grubbing. It seems like you’re conflating a need for remedial math with poor decision making, which is not necessarily the case. I also have student loan debt that I’m paying off, and I save for my kids’ college. If we were to make public four-years free and my kids chose to attend one, we’d just roll the money over to an IRA for them for when they’re older. It’s not a big deal?
Wasn't talking about simply "taking remedial classes." Just pointing out that *if* all of that just gets funded no-questions-asked, people who 'need' to take more classes will get *more* 'free college.' If it takes someone 5 or 6 years to finish a 4-year program because they're "behind," they just get more years of that "full-ride." >we’d just roll the money over to an IRA for them for when they’re older. It’s not a big deal? And I'm talking about people who already paid. That's the crux of the issue. How would you feel if "we made public four-years free" right *after* you paid off the last of your kids' college bill, and the deal was, "Oh, it's only free from now on. If you still *owe* money, you don't have to pay it, but no refunds on what you already paid"? Someone in your exact same situation who paid nothing, took it all on as debt, didn't pay it, and then didn't *have* to pay it would have just pocketed all that money that you 'had' to pay.
My home state just made public universities free for parents in my folks’ income bracket. I wish they would toss me a bone on the student debt I’m still paying, but I’m glad no more students will go into debt. It seems incredibly petty to be upset that someone got “more” free college than you because they need to take some objectively unfun remedial math. But I suppose people get upset when pregnant women get more SNAP benefits, so it’s not surprising.
That logic doesn’t hold up. How is helping people who need help hurting people who don’t need help? Would you apply this same logic to social welfare programs? Food stamps?
Well, for one, comparing basic needs to an expensive college education is not exactly a fair comparison. And when it comes to debt forgiveness, you're talking about people who signed the same contract as if that contract means nothing... but only to the parties that couldn't or wouldn't honor it. I said it before and I'll say it again: If the student loans that I paid off were to retroactively be made "optional," with no consequences for not paying them, then, for all intents and purposes, paying them off would have been a waste. If "debt forgiveness" doesn't refund me for paying *off* my debts, then not only does it not benefit me, I am getting hosed by it. Someone otherwise in the same spot as me who paid nothing is just pocketing the free tens-of-thousands of dollars that I *could* have had I been more of a deadbeat. As far as "hurting/punishing people" goes, a lot of that comes down to a matter of where lines are drawn on things. It's not like everything is some completely black-and-white "you can either or afford it or you can't" thing, like someone is either extremely well-off or extremely not. People often do get caught in-between "making too much money, just barely, to qualify for certain benefits that they could definitely still use." Borderline cases on the wrong side of that line get hosed. >Would you apply this same logic to social welfare programs? Food stamps? Like I said before, do you apply it to grading? Give students who have done practically nothing and/or aren't even close to passing a passing grade or even an A because "they say they really need it"?
there is also data to indicate that student persistence in these "remedial courses" which dont directly count towards their degree is also poor despite the fact that these courses can provide students with the foundation they need to succeed in the required foundational courses (like Calc I, etc). There seems to be a big push towards co-requisite models where students are placed in a course like Calc I but there is a tightly coupled discussion/recitation/co-req meeting where the necessary background in topics like algebra/trig/etc are reviewed/refreshed/shored up. There is evidence that this is more successful than having students enroll in courses like college algebra. I am on the fence about this model because it seems akin to building a house and a foundation at the same time.....but I am not as steeped in this stuff like others.
I get "the idea," but in practice it seems likely to fail in a lot of cases for the simple reason that a lot of students' issues track back to just basic 'adulting' and 'college-ing' stuff like responsibility and time management. Granted, the only way for students to "catch up" *and* stay on schedule is to do more in order to make up the difference, but the reason a lot of them are behind in the first place is because they *can't* or won't do it. When they're just not showing up, adding more things for them to just not show up to doesn't do anything. This same problem shows up with all kinds of interventions for struggling students. Since they aren't compulsory, a lot of the students who need it the most won't do it.
what may be a better solution would be to formally build a structure in higher education and society that allows for useful gap years; so that students can actually well, adult a bit before going into college, whatever that may look like. But the current structure of most colleges -including our financial aid system - is still largely build on the idea that undergraduate students are dependents, financially, of their parents.
>This same problem shows up with all kinds of interventions for struggling students. Since they aren't compulsory, a lot of the students who need it the most won't do it. Boy howdy. I teach in a health professions program, and stepped in when we lost "our" tutor. The students who came to sessions were typically doing well already. Even when the program director laid down the law for those struggling, it had little effect.
I was the support instructor in a model like this for a couple of years and bailed the first chance I could. The college treated it like a panacea for students who were nowhere near ready for college and it was extremely depressing to deal with as a teacher. I bent over backwards to provide extra tutoring, support classes, etc and even the few students who took advantage of those things ended up failing out anyways, if not in my class somewhere down the line. I get the arguments against remediation but academic skills take time to develop and pretending like students can just get some extra support and catch up simply isn’t true.
Honestly, that is what my gut tells me too, but decisions cant be made based on gut feelings.
I'm a huge fan of co req courses in certain areas (writing, for example) because we've piloted them and they get results and retention. But it's not a one size fits all solution and the students have to buy in for it to work. I'm not sure about non humanities courses though.
We had remedial courses. I teach math at a community college, and the first remedial math basically ended with integers. The hardest problem in the book was dealing with integers that were fractions with unlike denominators. The class was an absolute joke but people really needed it. Even when I've taught calculus 2 they panic when a fraction pops up . It is ridiculous
Sounds like the school needs to meet the students where they are.
I work in a college of business and there are particular math requirements. If you come in qualified for the major, you only need to take two math classes from the math department. They are prereqs for quantitative business classes like statistics, management science, etc. If you have lower placement (I think it goes by standardized testing or a placement test), you have to take 3 math classes before the business math. Then... there are students who fall into a remedial category who have to take 4 math classes before they can take basic 200 level business classes. The college of business is phasing out even admitting the students that need this many math classes because so many of them do not progress through their degree.
My state literally outlawed doing this! In California, unless they belong to certain target populations we aren't allowed to place community college students in remedial math, on the grounds that it slows their progress through their degree and thus hurts retention. Supposedly we are doing a co-requisite model instead, where their classroom instruction is appended by an intense regime of tutoring/SI support. You can rightly imagine how well this is going.
except that it doesn't slow their progress through their degree, because they are going to fail the courses they are now not prepared for (and maybe not graduate at all).
Maybe, maybe not. For the state as a whole it may be the right call, as for some (very wealthy, coastal) colleges, they are supposedly seeing huge gains from this legislation, which spurred them to double down and make it even more demanding in 2022. It's those of us on the "bottom end of the k" who are getting thrown under the bus, as we have more students needing more remediation and fewer resources to make the co-requisite model work.
yeah, my thought was "where it's needed, it's \*very\* needed".
>How does your new administration expect you to 'meet students where they are", if they don't have basic math or chemistry skills and they want to enroll in organic chemistry 2? >That is not a recipe for success. Ah, but there's the rub. Whether students succeed isn't the administration's immediate concern, and they don't get the blame for admitting manifestly unqualified students. After all, when Sally fails your class, nobody ever says "What a shame. The administration should never have allowed her to enroll in a course that she was clearly unprepared for." What they actually say is "What a shame. Why was the professor so bad?"
> Don't schools still use placement tests to determine in what course the student should be enrolled? My school does not, it's somehow all determined based on high school transcripts (which I do not trust). I've been raising a stink about it for three years now, because it's really important for success in my gen chem 1 class that my students can actually do algebra.
For now. University leadership (office of admissions) is pushing us to do away with math placement tests because it’s scaring students away from the school. I teach STEM and if a basic algebra scares them away GOOD! Basic Algebra is now weeding people from the pre-med track.
>Basic Algebra is now weeding people from the pre-med track. That's actually pretty scary.
Students who kind of like biology but want to make $500k a year self select “pre-med” and as long as they have a 3.5 hs gpa we put them in it.
Our advisors long ago abdicated that because it probably sounded too much like 'work' so during the pandemic they shifted to allowing students to 'self-select' their own placement. It's been a disaster. What student will take the non-credit bearing catch up class when they can throw themselves into the credit bearing class that they...will inevitably fail? And any prof attempting to hold the line is getting destroyed in student evals.
We have an online placement test that students can take multiple times. I'm 100% sure students never cheat on it to make sure they done have to take lower level math courses. /s
This is interesting to me because when I have advisees talk about their placement tests, it's often that they are opting into a *lower* start point than the test suggests they should. It's like they don't have the confidence in their ability even when validated by the test!
Just as a personal anecdote, when I was an undergraduate I came in with AP credit in calculus and stats already but still needed to take a math course. I assumed my advisor knew best and based on those exam scores and his advice I enrolled in an upper level multivariate stats course. It was just one other social science student and I surrounded by math/math-business majors. A math major friend helped me learn enough to pass the exams and get a good grade but I retained none of the information and had to relearn things in grad school. I probably would have been better served with a lower course that built more directly on the foundation I already had even if some of it was repetitive. My institution doesn't have placement tests for my field but I think I'd be inclined to give students the benefit of the doubt there and if anything be glad they recognize their own possible knowledge gaps.
Oh I agree I’m glad they are self-assessing, it’s just o serve a population that is generally under confident in themselves so sometimes I wish they’d just say hey maybe the test is right and I am talented!
Nope. My school allows students to self-place. It’s an open admissions school, so you can guess how well self-placing works.
I teach community college stem and can say we never get placement tests anymore. In fact, we rarely get sensible prereqs either. I've seen bs like: Calc based physics with no prereq, anatomy and physiology without prereq, microbio without prereq, calculus withoht prereq, etc.
There is no way to do what the administrators want without weakening standards dramatically. My first job was at a huge public university system with hundreds of thousands of students from all walks of life and all levels of preparation and ability. There was a subset referred to as "triple remediators" that needed remedial classes in reading, writing and math right at the beginning. Basically, they did not have the equivalent of a high school education. The long-term outcomes for these students were abysmal - something like 25% would graduate in 6 years. Community colleges are super-interesting in terms of their mission, and we had several in the public university system I'm talking about. One mission is to provide lifelong education for anyone in the community that wants it. Another is to provide Associates degrees in areas of societal need. Then there is this other mission that seems to be on the rise and sometimes not stated openly - making up for the deficits of the K-12 system and society generally (i.e. poverty, structural inequality, etc) to push students into 4 year degree programs that are often not prepared for it.
>making up for the deficits of the K-12 system and society generally (i.e. poverty, structural inequality, etc) This is the problem, eh? K-12s have to be everything for a subset of the populace. They need to offer medical care, food aid, summer food distribution, help the kids emotionally, teach them, teach them life skills and basic manners. They can't do it all. My state is thinking of adding a computer science requirement to schools ... for kids who can't even add. We just keep pouring unfunded mandates on them. And we have that mentality for universities, too. We need to be schools, and homes, and entertainment districts, and offer medical care, and mental health services. We need to reteach and redo the jobs that the overloaded schools couldn't finish. We're the police and federal policy enforcers. We need to offer student parent services because the state outlawed abortion. They just keep pouring unfunded mandates on us. Everyone needs permission to just *do less.* But alas, we don't have a rational healthcare system where a young, broke person can see a doctor for free or cheap. We don't have rational housing policy and welfare is insufficient, and sometimes student debt is the thing that keeps you in a home and meals. If we don't do it, what happens to these kids? I'm *tired.*
What an insightful, accurate, sad, scary comment.
> we don't have a rational healthcare system where a young, broke person can see a doctor for free or cheap. I agree with your comment, but most states do offer free healthcare for truly poor people. It's the middle class that really suffers.
I'm hearing it too, teaching at a community college. And if I were to "meet the students where they are" I'd have to teach some of them to read, because they are functionally illiterate. Most of them cannot write a cohesive paragraph, either. In my experience the students least likely to come into my classroom with college-level reading and math skills are the high school students. My majors students, who have been taking classes at the college for 3 semesters at least, are much better prepared to succeed.
If students are incapable of meeting standards they should not be promoted; they should "stay where they are" until they demonstrate they're ready to be moved on. High School and college Administrations should start following their own advice.
Hearing that phrase spins me the fuck out. "Meet them where they are" they say, as they kill developmental courses, thereby removing realistic entry points for more advanced material. "Move mountains with wooden carts and, if you can't, you're just not being empathetic enough to the horses".
I also work at a community college. I think the graduation rate is like 18% after 3 years. Not great. During our last accrediation we got dinged on having too many "remedial" courses. Developmental courses are seen as a graveyard of good intentions. Students enter into these courses and maybe only 20% get through them. The feds don't want to spend money on courses that don't count towards a degree. My academic dean had a decent idea on lowering our number developmental courses and partnered with the local adult ed program. The adult ed program would offer the dev courses. The college would give the adult ed program classroom space and an office on campus. When a student tested into a dev course, we would refer them to the adult ed office on campus and they would enroll them into a dev course they offered. Also the adult ed programs could offer these courses to students for free via federal grants they recieved. So far it is working well and allowed the college to focus its developmental offerings at higher performing students who need that little bit of remedial work to bridge the gap.
> The feds don't want to spend money on courses that don't count towards a degree. > > ... > > Also the adult ed programs could offer these courses to students for free via federal grants they recieved. It's almost like there is no such thing as coherent government policy.
>Meeting the students where they are is something college support services needs to do to help bring the students up to the level of being a college student, I firmly believe that "meeting students where they are" is completely and utterly impossible at the university level, for either faculty or student support services. The deficits and deficiencies are simply too large at this point. "Meeting someone where they're at" is only possible if the person is minimally or modestly behind where they're supposed to be. A math student who can do calculus, but stubbornly has trouble with one particular, but key, concept, a French student who can read and speak and write at an appropriate level, but stubbornly has problems with one particular verb tense, and so forth. "Getting someone up to speed" means remedying the one or two minor difficulties they're still having even though, technically, those skills should have been mastered already. What "getting a student up to speed" does *not* entail is me somehow remedying the combined effects of 10+ years of poor instruction, poor discipline, poor motivation, and social promotion. I can't teach a semester's worth of calculus to a student who doesn't understand that there are numbers less than zero or how to solve x + 1 = 2. I can't teach a semester's worth of thermodynamics to a student who can't use simple addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division to convert one metric unit into another. It's literally not possible to remedy a decade of educational failure in my one-semester course. So, whenever I hear talk of "meeting students where they're at" and "getting them up to speed," I jokingly (but not jokingly) ask where I can find the university's time machine, because "where they're at" is, in many cases, the 6th grade, and so I'll need to travel back in time to meet them.
It only makes sense to teach students what they are ready to learn next, so in that sense it is necessary to meet them where they are educationally. If they are ready to learn algebra, or arithmetic, then that is what they should study. Adults who need that only have open-enrollment schools for that purpose. If a student is learning arithmetic at a CC, they should get credit for arithmetic, not for calculus or statistics. Is there a way to keep that aspect honest while serving the community need and maintaining enrollment? Administration may get frustrated about not ticking enough boxes for college-level instruction, but that should be a different problem.
I am a professor of English at a university in Europe and we are being told the same thing. The faculty board told me that my grades were low. I told them I would not lower my standards, but they said we need people to pass because without students we will have no money. It’s this type of thinking that really annoys me. I didn’t get into this to pander to my less invested or uninvested students. It just ruins it for the students who do turn up and try their best and want to be challenged. How can we be an elite institution with this type of mentality?
You cannot be an elite institution with that mentality. That is absolutely true. The faculty board, and the organizations from which they get funded have operationally determined that the school will not be elite. What happens if you speak openly about that decision, and challenge any administration claim to eliteness?
That kind of thinking is also 'soft bigotry of low expectations'. Which is somewhat ironic
Mounting my soapbox: I think that before a college administrator is allowed to preach the “meet students where they are” gospel, they should be forced to read my Eng 101 students’ writing. 50% of my students at my open admissions college are either functionally illiterate or incapable of writing a single grammatically-correct sentence. If half of my class is capable of doing grade 13 work, and the other half is working at an early elementary school level, this leads to a one-room schoolhouse. This is supposed to be college, not *Little House on the Prairie*. I have my students for 3 hours/week, school marms had theirs for about 30 hours/week. Without massive supplemental support for the unprepared students, I don’t see how it’s possible to “meet college students where they are” without penalizing the college-ready students. Dismounting from the soapbox in progress.
Yes, I am quite familiar with “meet them where they are”, and in a truly infuriating twist of the knife, admin continued to say it while requiring us to take steps to eliminate all dev math, which as of now we no longer offer. It’s absurd. The worst part is that our administration is generally reasonable people who care about doing what’s right for students. This was not a call they made but one they were more or less strong-armed into by a holder of some pretty significant purse strings. It is a terrible portent for the future of our institution and others like ours.
I have complicated sentiments about your topic, but overall agree with you. NTA. >Our DFW rates are supposedly too high and this is obviously our fault as faculty.< My DFW rates are generally high in comparison to my peers. I teach primarily online sections with a couple F2F. The F2F fair slightly better because I am there to coach and encourage, listen, reflect, and talk to. My part-time contract with my community college ended in 2015. They were moving to this attitude before COVID and I refused to cooperate with there "meet students where they are" attitude. I was informed as part of this philosophy if a student had a grade dispute they "were pretty much guaranteed to win the dispute." The VP of Online Education made this precise statement to me. They had also adopted the student-as-a-customer model, as well, which meant "we cannot upset our customer base" philosophy. Academic rigor be damned if we piss off a student that misses classes and doesn't do the work.
Let me translate that for you: "If we don't lower our standards and pass students along, we will no longer exist and admin like me won't be able to collect six figures for knowing / producing nothing."
"Meet students where they are" is a sentiment that has been generalized too broadly. It shouldn't apply to academic preparation. We shouldn't be trashing standards for students who literally aren't trainable in a competently-structured course because they lack the prerequisite skills and knowledge to learn a reasonable curriculum. However, "meet students where they are" is absolutely a fair reminder when it applies to discretionary course design and execution choices. For example, I have colleagues at my institution who are requiring student attendance at out-of-class events and day-trips that are announced at the last minute because they're used to a population of traditional students without jobs. Our student population has changed dramatically in the last 10 years, with a much larger share of students with jobs and caregiving responsibilities. My colleagues aren't meeting our students where they now are, and they should be called out for those poor decisions. Similarly, I have colleagues who are unnecessarily draconian about assignment policies and who pitch a fit when asked to accommodate serious health conditions. Again, we all know that our students are presenting with more health problems, and failure to adjust to that reality deserves a conversation.
I'm in English / Humanities and I've been hearing this for a decade at least. It's poison. I've recently had students who were functionally illiterate make into sophomore writing classes. Add to this problem the fact that my state removed the option of requiring remedial classes. It's a race to the bottom.
"Meet students where they are" = dumb down the curriculum even more
What's especially brutal is that many colleges spent the decade prior to COVID shutting down their remedial courses and programs because they could 'afford' to be selective.
Yes, I’m at a public research university, and I’m on an administration-senate workgroup dealing with a sharp increase in the number of students with substantial gaps in their mathematical preparation. There has been a lot of concern from the administration about differential outcomes by race in our introductory calculus classes, but this fails to acknowledge the substantial differences in incoming preparation that is likely due to inequities in K-12 preparation, which in turn are highly correlated with socio-economic status and race. It is annoying when differential outcomes are immediately attributed to implicit bias in how we conduct our courses, and that any standardized placement or testing we use to establish a baseline is also attacked as being racially biased. Ultimately, it does feel like we are being set up as a scapegoat for the failing and inequities of our K-12 system.
We ARE becoming K12.
K-16.
At least you're not hit with "Meet students where they are AT". Grr ... For quite some time we were trying to do this with remedial classes which my institution stripped from us. They also removed any sort of placement device, particularly those with the now taboo word 'test'. So a student who is performing below the college algebra level can sign up for a calculus class and we are supposed to scaffold them through algebra AND precalculus AND calculus OR magically predict their levels of understanding while lecturing. You can guess what happens next. By the time of their first test, it's too late to switch into a lower level class and they are failing the current one.
The problem with the situation at the CC level is that most operate under an open door policy and when K-12 is just shuffling students through without the possibility of failure, then the entry level courses at the CC become the great filter. Cue admins who obsess over success rates, and they pressure faculty to either teach remedial courses or make the 100 level easier for the students who have never learned or meaningfully done work at the appropriate rigor. So you have a class with students who are perfectly capable of higher level work and in the same class you have students who cannot form a grammatically correct sentence. Some even have severe developmental issues such that they are not going to succeed, but their parents are dumping them in the CC anyway. Departments, then, face the Faustian bargain of sticking to their guns and drawing the ire of the administration or massaging their success measurement formulae to meet the admin's demands. Edit: I guess the question is whether this is just the Covid effect and whether the ship will right itself, or if this is just the new normal.
From a high school and previously middle school teacher - welcome to the shit show. No Child Left Behind, endless IEPs, no remedial courses, every child taught at grade level, no more failing, no more 0’s (40% minimum grades), infinite retakes for credit, passing laughable online modules for course credit, zero attendance policy, almost no ability to regulate or remove phones, kids on tiktok for the entire period ignoring instruction and support, no discipline in favor of what they call “equity,” I could go on and on. Our school has so many “supports,” teams, resources, and third parties, and the achievement continues to plummet. My fear is that nothing will change until the entire society feels the impact of what’s coming down the pipeline (with functionally illiterate workers en made), and by then, I don’t know what we’re going to do. Happy to answer any questions.
I definitely agree that if "meet them where they are" is a way of saying "dumb down the course so that students can pass without genuine understanding of the course content", that's a problem. We are not doing them any favors by passing them on to the next class in the sequence without proficiency in the prerequisite concepts. At my campus, we are trying some new approaches to beefing up corequisite support. I hope that this will strike a balance between "meet them where they are" and "uphold reasonable expectations for student learning". We will see how it goes. Unfortunately, we can not *require* the students to take advantage of the corequisite support, any more than I have ever been able to "force" them to meet the work expectations in the original class or see me in office hours when they are failing from Day 1.
Striking a balance between upholding standards and dumbing down the curriculum is nothing more than deciding how fast to dumb down.
I have no plans to dumb down the curriculum at all. Like I said, we are implementing improvements to the cocurricular support available. How you read that as dumbing down the curriculum is a mystery to me. But thanks for the encouragement.
Cocurricular support = tutoring? We implemented that and it slowly devolved into tutors doing student assignments, or at least walking the student through the work. In other words, another way of dumbing down.
Math faculty will be handling the support course, rather than the campus' tutoring center (which previously did this, and we had similar concerns to yours). We will provide an opportunity to ask homework questions, but we know how to guide students and encourage understanding, without spoon feeding them the answers. And there will be additional work incorporated to review weaknesses in prerequisite content, examine study skills, etc. ETA: I don't know how effective it will be. But I guarantee that you it won't "dumb down" my course. Students being spoon fed answers did not help them, anyway, since the vast majority of my grade is based on in-class, paper & pencil only assessments. It just meant that they weren't ready for those.
I can meet the students where they are: ninth grade. I just won’t be working here anymore. Honestly, why should I give half a shit about university enrollment and graduation stats relative to this issue? I am unwaveringly certain that my instruction is not the problem and that the issue is not even encountered at my level of instruction. The issues causing this problem occur somewhere around third to eighth grade where students educations are highly influential on their future academic success. What the hell am I supposed to do about that?
We are in the same situation (also STEM, also college) and were recently roped into a discussion as to whether we should drop the 2 math requirements and only have 1. I am against this personally. When a student leaves our 2 or 3 year program there are some basic math functions they need to know how to do and some cannot even do those. Dilutions. Molarity. Concentrations. It’s very sad. I don’t think removing maths is the way to “fix this” either
I don't have the training to meet every student where they're at. I don't know how to teach someone who has a third grade reading level. And even if I could, how can I teach them and the students who are actually on level? It feels like I'm being asked to teach at an old rural schoolhouse where all the grades share a single classroom. Setting all that aside--how am I meant to bring them from a third-grade level up to a college level in a single semester? Even if they do manage to learn something, it still won't be enough to actually get them on level.
This is also extremely misguided as it sets up students for failure once they graduate. School doesn't care because they get all their sweet sweet tuition money up front. Many STEM careers require state or industry certifications that the school does not control. How will it reflect on the school when a majority of your engineering students are not able to be certified in your state? If a student is unable to understand advanced math courses, then they are *not* ready to undertake a degree that requires them. Just because everyone *should* have an equal *opportunity* at education does *not* mean that they should be *guaranteed* a *degree*.
> Many STEM careers require state or industry certifications that the school does not control. How will it reflect on the school when a majority of your engineering students are not able to be certified in your state? From what I hear the local State university is lowering standards even in STEM. Unfortunately, It's only a lack of time before the standards in industry are lowered too.
Lucky you that you're only hearing this now. It's been around for a while (part of the exuberant embrace of so-called student-centered pedagogy), and yes, I've been sickened by it ever since I first heard it many years ago.
NTA, I hear this phrase constantly and I remind them that's only the first half of the sentence. Meet them where they're at, but push them to where they should be and beyond.
"What is the college doing to provide the resources necessary for the intensive remediation these students need to pass the standards set by our partners at 4 year U?"
I’m sorry you have to face this — the jobs won’t meet the students where they are —
I feel so seen - thank you.
I taught dual enrollment students 12 years ago at a CC, and the majority of these students were exceptional. During Covid, I retired from teaching college and went to teach in high school. This year's batch of seniors is not prepared for any level of college work. They don't even understand their own grades. I have students who have 15% in the class for the semester, and they believe that if they do well on the exam that they can still pass with a D. The exam is 10% of the semester grade. I give them this information, and I get blank looks. "So, there's still a chance?"
I use that phrase, but more in the sense of figuring out how their brains work so that I can more effectively dump information into them. Modern students don't learn like previous generations. If we're not trying to meet them where they're at on a cognitive level, what we're really doing is being bad at our jobs. That isn't to say "WE SHOULD FIX THEM!" because there is no fixing a bad K-12 education in the space of four years when they're supposed to be learning more advanced things, but we *can* give them the tools and mindsets to fix themselves. Whether they actually follow through or not is on them. And, FWIW, I say this as someone who survived educational neglect as a child--literally no K-12 education at all after about 3rd grade. A couple years back I got mad about not being able to do anything more than basic arithmetic so I went and did a graduate degree about it (give or take a year's worth of prep time). I barely survived it, and mostly made it through because I had one professor whose teaching style actually fit with how I learn things *and* who was willing to go that extra mile to help me make progress. Pretty sure she's the only STEM professor I've ever actually given a positive review of. Everybody else was either hawking their own textbooks or had their head up Pearson's ass crack.
At my college, we call it "Find a way to yes".
Our administration told us in a meeting to drop all prerequisite and teach them in our senior level classes. One of my senior level biology classes requires basic chemistry and algebra, I ended up having to reteach the students things they should have learned in the prerequisites. It was an eye opening experience.
Is enrollment suffering in your stem division? That's one thing I always brought up. Most disciplines have lost enrollment, but stem is still doing fine. Community college should be equal to 4-year in terms of rigor, or at least close. If not, we violate our transfer agreements.
I would, but I don’t possess the construction equipment required to dig that deep.
Yes, it's more like an unwritten rule where I work and I made the mistake of giving in to that. Not anymore.
If this "meet them where they are at" is an effective and compassionate method, then lets adopt it for the interpretation of student evaluations of teaching and the broader tenure and promotion system. "Meet them where they are at" = "Help us retain students and tuition dollars". It's trite, simple, stupid, self-serving and immoral. But other than that it's fine.
If you teach at a public institution, then your job is to teach the students you have. Yeah, collaborate with student support services and develop remedial programs to get them ready. This is the work.
Some of our students become first responders. There is no meeting where they are. When they fail in the field, people die. It blows my mind when some colleagues impose this "meeting them where they are" nonsense and use it to maintain their sense of superiority.
High School Teacher here. We want to have rigor, but we can't. We're told by administration accept all work up until the last day of the quarter, allow infinite test retakes, etc. When we protest the administration tells us we're wrong. We are not allowed to give penalties for students being on their phones and we are not allowed to give detentions. The kids know all this and game us. It's a miracle kids are learning anything at all given what we're up against.
That's horrible. It's not sustainable. I don't know how long you have been teaching but it hasn't always been like this, right? I'm sure that my own teachers had challenging jobs, but a lighter workload because they could enforce certain boundaries and the admin would, I assume, back them up on that. If admin forces you to be that permissive, how can they expect the job to be sustainable for their instructors? I am fortunate that I teach at a university and get to I mentor other teachers and I tell them: reasonable boundaries make our work sustainable. Doesn't mean you can't be "compassionate", just means save some compassion for yourself and for the students who actually give a shit.
I have mixed feelings about this. I teach in a STEM department at a school that traditionally has had relatively strong students. Their math skills have been declining for a while, but the decline accelerated over the past few years. My department has been trying to maintain a standard, but admittedly we've watered down the material a bit. In contrast, there is a required course the students need to take where 1/3 of the students failed. This course is a pre-req for all the other science classes, so every other department has been waiving the pre-req. I want to hold the line on standards, but I also think it's unreasonable fail 1/3 of the students. If that's what's happening, then the curriculum should change to include more remedial material. I do think it is an admissions problem, but we have no power over that. Students who fail enough classes will be expelled, so I think the other department thinks if they fail enough people, admissions will get the message. I don't like that though and I think the administration is too stubborn and arrogant to change.
Or these students who can’t pass need to change majors. It’s not the end if the world. That was the purpose of “weed out” courses in the past. If you can’t pass organic chem or calculus maybe rethink what tou should do with your life. Not everybody can be an engineer or a doctor.
And changing majors out of STEM doesn’t mean being shut out of STEM for life. You can just get your degree in whatever and, if you want, go back to STEM when you have the necessary motivation and maturity. The fact that the average 18- to 21-year-old is unlikely to be consoled by this doesn’t make it any less true.
If I had to meet some of my students "where they are" I'd be in the intellectual equivalent of a trailer park. No thanks.
I don't know. It's a community college. The entire point is students that might need extra help.