BUZZ
No longer relying on honor system
University of Pennsylvania students will have to prove they have the necessary math skills to enroll in certain classes, officials announced recently.
The school hopes the changes will ensure students are ready for advanced level classes.
“Penn’s math prerequisites aren’t new; they have always been listed alongside course descriptions in the catalog, but now the university will verify them instead of relying on students to decide whether or not they meet the requirements,” Inside Higher Ed reported.
“Faculty in Math and other disciplines have carefully designed the courses in a sequential manner to support student learning,” Molly McGlone, a deputy dean in the College of Arts and Sciences, told Inside Higher Ed. “Students who are in courses that they are not adequately prepared for can often run into challenges.”
Other departments plan to enforce their prerequisites, which were previously self-enforced by students, leading to problems.
The Daily Pennsylvanian reported:
In a statement to The Daily Pennsylvanian, Mathematics professor and Department Chair Jonathan Block wrote that this change was “motivated by at least two factors.”
“We are trying to provide better guidance and placement into our curriculum,” Block wrote. “In some cases, students ignore the prerequisites, enrolling in classes they think they are ready for that end up being too advanced for them.”
Block also explained that the department’s decision supported a school-wide effort to enforce prerequisites.
News of the change comes at the same time a University of California Berkeley math professor drew attention to the lack of math skills among many of her students.
“I teach mathematics at UC Berkeley. Three days a week, I stand in front of lecture halls with 500 to 1,400 students. By the second week of the semester, I already know who is in trouble,” Zvezdelina Stankova wrote in an article published by The San Francisco Standard.
Stankova added that she works with students who are “five to eight years behind in mathematics.”
“Office hours that should be spent discussing integrals instead become lessons on fractions and basic algebra you would expect students to learn in middle school,” she wrote. Stankova supports the return of standardized testing for admissions to California universities.
Among a possible contributing factor is that the top feeder school for the university also has few students who are proficient in math. Yet teachers are passing them.
As The Post Millennial found, Mission High School in San Francisco “has the highest acceptance rate to the University of California, Berkeley” despite 94% of its students failing math.
The news outlet reported: “Mission High School had a 45 percent acceptance rate to the elite university last fall, well above the state’s 15 percent average, according to data obtained by the San Francisco Chronicle.”
Students reported that simply showing up and trying to do the exercises could earn a passing grade in the class.
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