When we are put into a catch-22 situation, we should not expect sympathy from the ones who created the catch-22 situation.

The full letter (https://ucstudentsuccess.org/) gestures towards "growing pressure to dilute quantitative rigor". The strong implication seems to be that some administrators have told some faculty that the failure rates you'd get from holding the line are unacceptable. Presumably they don't want to frame this issue as a faculty vs. administration thing, which makes sense to me.

This shouldn't be a hard problem to solve. At the state university I'm most familiar with, every incoming Freshman takes a math assessment test. If they don't pass it, they have to take remedial coursework (which does not count towards their degree requirements).

And yes, every student takes it, even the ones with high school AP math and high SAT math scores. The only exception might be if they have already completed and passed actual accredited university math courses for credit.

Do they not have remedial classes for these students? It's been more than 20 years, but back in my day, if you weren't ready for entry level classes (but still got in to university) you took remedial classes first.

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That's a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself.

Treating universities as a system, it is deeply problematic and even immoral to saddle students with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt to enter programs that it is entirely predictable that the student will fail at.

The solution is to use all the methods available to predict how successful the student is likely to be after matriculating, not to water down curriculum to the point where the most marginal student in the class will pass.

In part this is a consequence of blank slate ideology, which presupposes that all students are equally capable of identical outcomes and that individual student failures are always / usually systemic failures in disguise.

This is a silly perspective, but the blank slate folks really got their tendrils in just about anywhere. In reality, some people are simply bad at math. More education will help, but they will always be disadvantaged compared to people who are more naturally predisposed. (note, I'm quite bad at math myself)

It may seem altruistic to err on the side of caution here and try to catch the kids that fall through the gaps, (again, assuming that they are falling through the gaps due to systemic failures) but as the article points out, there is a limit to this approach; eventually it brings the talented students down and degrades the program.

>You cannot reject more than one or two students in a year

this seems absurdly low, from my experience. but i have only taught in one school, so maybe we're the outlier? i would say one to two failing students per course is the baseline, not the cap.

can you share where you are getting this number from? is that the guideline where you teach?

In 2005 I had to take placement tests before I could even enroll in my classes, so someone who wasn't actually ready for Calculus wouldn't get to enroll in it if they didn't pass the placement tests.

It was all part of the admissions process.

Sounds somewhat defeatist. Besides, the teacher nevers wants to fail anyone. Teachers would be happy if all students performed well.

The universities can just fail them out and admit people who barely missed the admission bar in their place. Many of them will make it.

What's wrong with making universities easier to get into, but harder to stay in?

It's kind of like how if you owe the bank $1000, you have a problem, but if you owe a bank $100M, they have a problem. You just can't reasonably ignore a huge portion of the class as a professor without a serious amount of documentation, and proof that you've tried to escalate and solve the issue. Ultimately, people are paying for these courses, and it's probably better to teach something rather than nothing.

They should not admit students who have little chance of success

There are several interrelated problems.

Makes a lot of sense. I can't imagine giving up significant chunk of my regular teaching for offering remedial math!

I know, but your comment also in no way implies that you are taking into account the bigger picture here, where the criticism is directed at the admissions process, and wherein universities are honestly at fault.

If university-level classes have pre-requisites that should be taught in high school, then universities should screen for that and disqualify students who do not have the required competency. They should not be taking the students' money, admit them in the institution, and then let them enroll in classes that they are not prepared to succeed in. That's outright extortion. Many of those students have to take on debt to pay for their education, and besides the financial cost, it's a waste of time, and their failures would be mentally crushing and have lifelong repercussions.

I sympathize with educators in that they cannot slow the whole class down, but that's the point: universities shouldn't be putting educators in a position to compromise the teaching. Meanwhile, educators also shouldn't accept that "pointing [students] in the right direction to get caught up" is enough, because objectively speaking, it's not---that is not how a student develops an understanding of maths and sciences. For the student, that requires a focused (and in many cases, guided) study of those subject areas and before university, without the stress of catching up to university-level courses that are already being taken at the same time.

I don't think it's helpful to be that rigid about it. Both the teacher and the student has an interest in the student learning something. Sometimes we have to give each other a bit of leeway to get to the destination.

There's a whole "philosophy of education" discussion I'd like to avoid, but the goal of education isn't really to educate one person to their maximum potential, but rather to educate as many people as well as possible. The individual should sacrifice for the collective.

Trying to make it a straight forward linear dependency chain displays a sort of autistic adherence to rigid hierarchy that's really common in software people, but really uncommon everywhere else.