California State University, which recruits from the top third of California graduates, plans to stop using placement tests to decide whether students need remediation in English and math, reports Emily DeRuy in the San Jose Mercury News. Instead, CSU schools will analyze high school grades and SAT or ACT scores.Grades aren't a very useful tool for universities, and periodically there's talk of ditching the SAT/ACT because somehow they're racially biased. Let's be blunt--you have to have some way of determining if a student is ready for college-level work.
This is a bad idea. A wise man once spoke about "the soft bigotry of low expectations". This idea is Exhibit A.
Juxtaposed with that article is this one:
Illinois high schools have cut remedial classes and placed most students in a “general” college-prep track that doesn’t prepare graduates for college, concludes a Chicago Tribune analysis of the class of 2015.My district in California is well on its way to doing this.
2 comments:
Well, golly, that means jobs-a-plenty for all those Adjunct English and Math professors! This looks like a win/win for the college, because more butts in seats = more funding, more underpaid non-permanent teaching staff so money is saved, and more administrators to help these less-enabled students to succeed in a foreign environment!
The only people who don't win? The students...
But never mind them -- everybody needs a college degree,and by golly, we're gonna make it happen, even if we end up bollixing up the edumacation system so that the college degree is merely a gussied up high school diploma.
You must understand that regardless of their abilities or their ambitions (or lack thereof) progressives insist on guaranteeing equal outcomes. Since they can't get the slothful, foolish and defiant to actually show up to do the work and achieve, these lofty liberal entities will insure that good students fail because they won't get what they need from professors, teaching assistants and others who are overloaded with trying to explain why a kid who reads on the fourth grade level can't become a biochemist. Of course that's assuming the kid with the fourth grade reading level can spell biochemist on the complaint. More and more I wish I had simply sent my kids to a good trade school. My son would be ever so much happier as a car mechanic and my younger son would have absolutely rocked as a building contractor. It's time for us to stop the nonsense about the importance of a college degree for every single job. It's an excuse to deny access to some people. It's simply unnecessary.
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