Do Remedial Classes Hurt Community College Students?
Should community college scrap remedial courses?
Josh White writes at the Washington Post:
Are remedial courses actually hurting community college students?
Four years ago, I stumbled across startling research that remedial courses in community colleges — a backbone of American higher education — often do no good, and that colleges do not adequately inform students about the true consequences of the placement tests that put students in those remedial courses.
Researchers Katherine L. Hughes and Judith Scott-Clayton in their 2011 paper said 92 percent of two-year colleges used placement test scores to decide if students would be consigned to remedial courses that they had to pay for, but for which they earned no credit. The College Board’s popular ACCUPLACER placement test failed to mention this critical issue, instead obscuring it with happy talk.
“You cannot ‘pass’ or ‘fail’ the placement tests, but it is very important that you do your very best on these tests so that you have an accurate measure of your academic skills,” a College Board guide said.
Huh? As Hughes and Scott-Clayton pointed out, the tests were used not just to measure skills but “as a high-stakes determinant of students’ access to college-level courses.”
Are remedial courses actually hurting community college students? (Washington Post)
Comments
These courses are a waste of time because many of the students in them lack the basic knowledge and critical faculty to succeed in college; worse yet, they are unwilling to do more than the barest in order to pass. I’ve taught remedial college English classes, very methodically starting with the sentence. It’s a waste of money because the people in the courses should not have been in college. To expect the colleges to do what the public schools failed to do and students refused to learn is absurd.
I’ve taught and tutored remedial math at the local community college. The ones who wind up in these classes are not in there “by mistake,” believe me. Juba is right; the vast majority of these remedial students have no business attending college in the first place.