Remediation is a disaster...so let's look at the new plan (har)

Ever Changing Remediation: A Specific Example

“We’ve been doing it wrong, focusing on getting remedial students to pass remedial courses. This new process puts remedial students directly into college classes, and passes them from there!”

--Administrator, explaining the latest amazing new idea on August 6, 2012

 

     Administrators are well aware that remedial students tend to fail college classes, and rather than take the choice of integrity (stop loaning money to so many remedial students), are always very eager to try something, anything, to get these students to pass. Improved passing, improved retention, is the only definition of a good education an administrator can understand, all those unemployed but degree-holding people occupying Wall Street notwithstanding. Almost every year I endure yet another cockamamie plan to improve retention, and so allow me to cover the most recent one in detail:

     On August 6, 2012, I attended six hours of meetings to address the latest method: co-requisite courses for remedial math and English. I can’t even guess at the money spent merely to have English and math faculty, along with administrators, travel from all over the state to Baton Rouge for this catered meeting. First, administrators present an array of statistics regarding how amazing the new idea is: at every level, “education” is ignored, and instead all improvement is measured in passing rates. The entire definition of a successful program is whether it passes students or not. Every statistic presented to us is all about the retention. After a flood of such data, impressive to administrators and irrelevant to educators, we’re told of the new plan.

     The new plan this time around? Instead of having students take remedial classes before taking college classes (for example, taking College Preparatory Algebra II before being allowed to take College Algebra), the new plan is to have students take both courses, remedial and college level, at the same time, and force them to get extra support. The remedial class is more like a lab, with teaching assistants giving more personal help. And the statistics show it works! Yay, passing rates are much higher!

     It’s so, so, trivial to manipulate and mislead the effectiveness of these programs via statistics, however, and most everyone outside of administration knows it—all the grey-haired faculty simply chuckle behind the administrators’ backs, having seen this stuff dozens of times over their careers. It takes nothing to pass more students, for example one could just make “C” the lowest possible grade in the course.

     The new English remedial program was particularly amusing—first, the salesman tells us how 15% of remedial students never take a college level writing course even after passing remedial writing. Then, he tells us his new program has 0% of these students not taking a college writing course. How does he achieve it? The new program forces all remedial students directly into college level writing courses. At least he knew that his success wasn’t exactly surprising, given the requirements. Still, if success is defined as taking a college level course, a program that forces the taking of a college level course is guaranteed to be successful. It is, comparatively speaking, one of the more honest plans for improved retention I’ve seen.

     The math co-requisite program likewise wasn’t above manipulation to show how successful it was, although at least it put some effort into being misleading. Like almost all these programs, students were self-selected; only those that accepted the warnings that it would require hard work and dedication could enter the co-requisite program. Sure enough, this program showed greatly improved retention rates, 80% as opposed to the more typical 50%.

     Restrict my classes to only hard working, dedicated students, and I’ll probably do quite a bit better than average, too, no matter what special program I try. In twenty years of being subjected to these pitches, I’ve yet to see a program where they divided self-selecting students like these into two groups, with the program only being used on one group. This would go some way to showing it’s the program, and not the self-selected students, that are making a difference. Why is this basic, rudimentary, obvious, idea seldom, if ever, implemented? I imagine it’s because legitimate studies that use such controls don’t show any major improvements among hardworking students relative to anything else (since the material at this level is learn-able by most anyone that puts effort into it), and thus aren’t sold to administrators.

     Next, we were shown how the co-requisite math students had much higher grades and passing rates, using a variety of poorly demonstrated interactive techniques and group projects. Group projects are a red flag that something is bogus about the coursework, there’s just no real learning in group projects, merely, at best, a theoretical division of skills by students doing what they already know how to do. Nobody pays attention to the new activities that supposedly help so much, because everyone knows the ones running the program can give whatever grades they want and pass everyone on a whim. Higher grades and passing rates are meaningless in a controlled system with the person selling it giving out the grades.

     Even administrators and the folks selling the new plan know passing rates are easily manipulated upward, so they back up the improved passing rates with an important-sounding statistic. Every incoming student had to take a standardized placement test, and the scores were recorded. The new students had an average score on the test of 211. At the end of the course, they re-administered the tests to the students that passed, and the students got an average score of 232. A 21 point improvement on a standardized test! The program works! Yay!

     The pitchmen gloss over that 250 is the cutoff score for students to go into College Algebra for the placement test, so all they’ve done is pass students out of College Algebra who still don’t qualify to take College Algebra despite having just passed it. Instead, the improved scores are celebrated. Without any question from administration, statistics like these are always taken as evidence, but a bit of critical thinking reveals these numbers from a standardized test still don’t show anything worth believing.

     Much like with the self-selected students, there’s no control group, no set of students outside the program to compare test scores to. For all I know, a typical student that passes College Algebra has a 30 point improvement on that placement test, or that simply taking the test repeatedly will cause a 30 point improvement. In the latter case, numbers like administration provided could be taken as evidence that the co-requisite program is a massive disaster, with students worse off than if they’d never entered the program. For some reason, administration never thinks to ask such a basic question or administer this rudimentary control. It would cost a hundred bucks or so to double-administer those tests to a class or two of students, but I guess there’s hardly any money left over after the many thousands of dollars spent implementing the program and pitching it to various states.

     Even without a single control, there’s another issue here. Only the students that pass the course are re-taking the placement test, and yet it’s taken as evidence of improvement when the average score goes up. The students that failed (or dropped) don’t retake the test, so we don’t have their scores. Gee whiz, you take out all the F students, and the average grade increases. Practically everyone on the stage selling this to us has a Ph.D., a research degree, in Education, and none of them see this issue.

     One of the pitchmen dares to complain that they’re still looking for better ways to get statistics, but none of the faculty bother to try to help with any of the above suggestions about controls or factoring out the failing students.

     An empowered faculty would point and laugh at administrators using such poorly compiled statistics in a vacuum to justify a major re-working of course programs. Instead, the faculty sit quietly and take it, for the most part. One brave soul asks “How do you expect us to teach the college material with the unprepared students sitting right there, doing nothing?”…the people giving the pitch mumble out a response that the answer to the question will come later, but it never does. Similarly, a question is asked about the failing students in the program, and we’re told that the only students that failed in this program were the ones that didn’t want help, disregarding how that conflicts with the self-selection process.

     This program could affect every remedial student, as well as the non-remedial students who get put in co-requisite “college” courses along with the remedial students. In short, faculty are being strongly encouraged to follow a program that could affect a clear majority of college students and the best argument given to us for buying into this plan, beyond the meaningless “better retention,” is a single feeble statistic from an uncontrolled experiment. Administration knows they can do whatever they want anyway, and just goes through the motions of convincing faculty that it works.

     Someone with a legitimate research degree, much less a statistician, would be embarrassed to present this sort of isolated statistic as useful, and yet, one of the pitchers of the new plan proudly tells us she’s an actual mathematics professor, instead of saying that her doctorate is actually in Education. She gave no hint at all of her degree in the presentation or in any of the handout materials, as though she were embarrassed about it. I had to scramble around online to find that detail out. I found something else online, too.

 

But I'll save that for next post.

 

Remedial Education, an Introduction to the Reality of College Today

The Myth of Remediation

 

A student came to me for my developmental math class, and passed, with hard work. He took me again for College Algebra, and Trigonometry, passing both. He graduated, off to a local university. Two years later, he came to me for help in his latest math course, Differential Equations.

--A rare success story for me. At one institution, not one student in four years went from developmental math to successfully passing Calculus I, much less Differential Equations, which is taken after Calculus III.

 

     A great scam needs suckers, and the more suckers, the better. It didn’t take long before administrators realized that the big, big money was in broadening the market, dragging remedial students into the pool of victims.

     The easily acquired and plentiful student loan scheme means anyone can go to college, but what if the student has little in the way of academic skill or interest? A popular TV commercial hawking college education has the would-be student sing about not doing great in high school—enough to keep a student out of college, years ago, and evidence the myth is still alive. It’s not just late night TV commercials that target these potential students (or should I say victims?) for enrollment, although there has always been some option for remedial classes at college or university. Only a few such classes were offered, since “in the good old days,” only a few students lacking in basic skills could nonetheless gain admittance to an institution.

     No matter the era, no matter the subject, no matter the class, there are always going to be some students weaker than others. Both faculty and administration were against students being in classes beyond their capability, albeit for different reasons. Even a few weak students force the teacher to slow down, and reduce course content, and that harms the prepared and hardworking students, who need that content to succeed in later courses…and the weaker students still fail. This lowers passing rates, which administration cannot tolerate.

Answer: “The Rapist.”

Question: “How does a remedial psychology student pronounce the word ‘therapist’?”

--Campus joke.

 

     An aberration emerged from the unholy alliance between faculty and administration: institutional remediation. The weaker students, the ones more likely to fail, would be identified and shuffled off to special classes, so that faculty wouldn’t have to deal with them in the “regular” courses. Administration could still claim a large student base, and better course passing rates as well. This is a win-win situation, in theory, and absolutely there needs to be an option for students that legitimately have reasons for not knowing basic material, material they’ll need to know if they want to learn the concepts of higher education. As long as the numbers of students requiring remediation are small, the system was fairly effective at giving borderline students a chance to prove they really could excel in a college environment, despite a rough start.

     In today’s college environment, entrance restrictions are minimal, so most anyone can get accepted into an institution of higher learning. Student loans are not strictly acquired by people who “want to learn,” even if they don’t know all that much to begin with. Instead, student loans are granted to anyone who can “check a box saying you are a degree seeking student.” Administrations at many institutions have become very successful at talking people into checking that box, and remediation has come to dominate “higher education” now, with a great number of incoming students requiring one or more remedial courses before beginning a real college education. There would be many more remedial students, a clear majority even, but administration has “defined down” college material over the years to keep this from happening.

     Even institutions with admission standards still admit remedial students. To take a college math course the student might need to score 250 on a placement test, while the admission “standard” requires the student to score 200 to get admitted to the college. While one has to chuckle at a college “standard” that admits students not ready for college, such is quite common. Having a great number of students going into remedial courses looks bad for institutions of higher education, but administration tirelessly works to fix this problem, but not in a way that a person of integrity might think:

 

“We’re going to reduce the score necessary on the placement test to get into College Algebra so that even the weakest students will be told they can skip developmental courses if they want to. They’ll still be competitive.”

 

--Administrator, explaining a clever plan to reduce the number of students taking remedial courses. Until I heard this, I had no idea that getting an education was a competition. This change in policy led to several disastrous years in the entry level mathematics courses.

 

     When a student tries to enroll for an entry level course, often he’ll take some sort of placement test to see where he fits as far as reading, writing, and mathematical skills. There are many sorts of tests, each with their own special scoring system, ultimately translated into either “good enough for a college level course” or “should take a remedial course.” Amongst the many choices, most institutions favor some form of standardized test, paying a dollar or two per student for the privilege of having an independent company quickly grade and administer the test online. These tests are far from perfect, but have been around for decades, with constant improvement by many private corporations legitimately interested in providing a better, more accurate product. They are quick, cheap, and about 95% accurate for determining which mathematics course a student should take next. Quick and cheap are important factors—the days of real “entrance examinations” for incoming college students are long over, students want to be admitted quickly, and administration complies. The advantage to online grading is there’s no need to wait for faculty to come in to grade the test; even if no faculty are around, the test can be administered and graded in a matter of minutes, an hour at most and often less. The 95% accuracy might sound very good, but it means that in every classroom of at least 20 students, you’ll expect one student was misdiagnosed by the test.   

     I admit that’s high, but institutions have no choice in the matter: they really need way to figure out where a student belongs. It’s not feasible to administer to every student a 3 hour comprehensive test and hand grade it (this would be around 99% accurate, and costly, assuming an incoming student would take such a test). A fast, cheap test that costs almost nothing to administer is a fine solution, and this as good a way as any to determine the extent of mathematical education a person received in 12 years of public school. To get around the “low” accuracy of the test, any student who complains bitterly enough can take any course he wants, going into remedial if the test says he should be in College Algebra, or vice versa. This event is rare, but happens, usually to the detriment of the student—at some point you have to let a person make his own mistakes.

    As hinted at above, administration hates losing control of students to placement tests, and is always looking into ways to take back control. The most likely way in the future will be through PARCC, a placement test that will allow students to place out of placement tests. It probably will be more accurate, as some parts will be hand-graded, making it harder for a student to look knowledgeable with just a few lucky guesses. A planned trial on 20 million tests will take place soon. It doesn’t take a calculator to see the amount of money being poured into re-inventing the placement tests is huge. Administration clearly wants this control, and a reasonable person might wonder how well they could be trusted with this power.

     A student that does poorly on a placement test, no matter how poorly, is never turned away. “No problem,” says college admissions, “you’ll just need to take a developmental course or two and then you’ll be fine!” Years ago, these types of courses were called “remedial,” and this is a more accurate word, since it indicates a correction of something deficient, in this case deficiency of skills and knowledge that should have been gained in public school. “Remedial” became something of a slur, so they started calling them “developmental,” which administration insists means the same thing, just not a slur. Whatever the name for these courses, administration certainly never tells students that fewer than 1 in 10 remedial students will get a 2 year degree within 3 years¹ That’s above a 90% failure rate…these are not good odds for making a low-interest loan. That’s just getting the degree, even with a degree it’s not at all certain the graduate will get a job that pays sufficiently to address the loan.

     And those are the successful students! 40% of students that start in remedial never make it out of remedial courses. Of course, the college gets the loan money, while the student gets the debt, so the college has no reason to tell the student such depressing information…he might change his mind about going to college, and there goes that sweet check.

 

“Someone’s making a lot of money off this. Not us.”

--Mathematics department head, at another daylong meeting addressing ways to improve remediation.

 

     Another dirty little secret of remediation is the sheer size of it. College remediation is a 3 billion dollar industry, and over half of incoming community college students will require remedial coursework (around 20% of university students will require remediation, but this is a little misleading since most weaker students get directed towards community college). Keep this in mind when a community is being sold on opening up a community college for “higher education”: the majority of the students there will be learning high school level material—material the community already paid for their children to learn in high school. Universities even have tried to justify rising tuition costs due to all the additional remediation they do. If remediation were truly that expensive, the university could just, well, not admit the remedial students in the first place, although administration would never turn down a warm body.

      Actually, to call the material high school level is rather generous. It makes sense to look at remedial courses in some detail, to make it easier to see what’s going on in this critical stream of institutional revenue. I’ll focus on the math courses since I know them well, although the situation is only a little different in the English courses. We'll start with 'College Algebra' next time.

An example of how the folks in charge plan to improve remediation

Ever Changing Remediation: A Specific Example

 

 

“Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.”

-Napoleon

     An honest look at what’s going on in higher education today might lead one to believe that the folks running the show are deliberately trying to hurt people, or at least exploit them for profit. I’d like to present an example of how administrators respond to the disaster of remediation. Look below, and see a plan to “fix” higher education, and decide for yourself if malice or incompetence best describes the actions of our leaders.

 

 “We’ve been doing it wrong, focusing on getting remedial students to pass remedial courses. This new process puts remedial students directly into college classes, and passes them from there!”

--Administrator, explaining the latest amazing new idea

 

     Administrators are well aware that remedial students tend to fail college classes, and rather than take the choice of integrity (stop loaning money to so many remedial students), are always very eager to try something, anything, to get these students to pass. Improved passing, improved retention, is the only definition of a good education an administrator can understand, all those unemployed but degree-holding people occupying Wall Street notwithstanding.

     There were six hours of meetings to address the latest method: “co-requisite” courses for remedial math and English. First, administrators present an array of statistics regarding how amazing the new idea is: at every level, “education” is ignored, and instead all improvement is measured in passing rates. Every statistic presented to us is all about retention (the word administration uses for “passing”). After a flood of such data, impressive to administrators and irrelevant to helpless educators, we’re told of the successful new plan.

     What’s “co-requisite”? Instead of having students take remedial classes before taking college classes (for example, taking remedial math before being allowed to take College Algebra), the new plan is to have students take both courses, remedial and college level, at the same time. The remedial class is more like a lab, with teaching assistants giving more personal help. And the statistics show it works! Yay, passing rates are much higher!

     It’s trivial to mislead the effectiveness of these programs via statistics, and most everyone outside of administration knows it—all the grey-haired faculty simply chuckle behind the administrators’ backs, having seen this stuff dozens of times. It takes nothing to pass more students, for example one could just make “C” the lowest possible grade in the course, so that everyone passes. 

     The math co-requisite program wasn’t above manipulation to show how successful it was. Students were self-selected; only those that accepted the warnings that it would require hard work and dedication could enter the co-requisite program. Sure enough, this program showed greatly improved retention rates, 80% as opposed to the nationwide average of around 50%.

     Restrict my classes to only hard working, dedicated students, and I’ll probably do quite a bit better than average, too. In twenty years of being subjected to these pitches, I’ve yet to see a program where they divided self-selecting students like these into two groups, with the program only being used on one group. This would go some way to showing it’s the program, and not the self-selected students, that make the difference. Why is this basic, rudimentary, obvious, idea seldom, if ever, implemented? It’s because legitimate studies that use such controls don’t show any major improvements.

     Next, we were shown how the co-requisite math students had much higher grades and passing rates, using a variety of poorly demonstrated interactive techniques and group projects. Group projects are a red flag that something is bogus about the coursework: there’s no learning in group projects, merely, at best, a theoretical division of skills by students doing what they already know how to do (a recent book, Academically Adrift, shows that the more time students spend in group work, the less they learn).

     The pitchmen back up the improved passing rates with an important-sounding statistic. Every incoming student had to take a standardized placement tes. The new students had an average score on the test of 211. At the end of the course, they re-administered the tests to the students that passed, and the students got an average score of 232. A 21 point improvement on a standardized test! The program works! Yay!

     The pitchmen gloss over that 250 is the cutoff score for students to go into College Algebra for the placement test, so all they’ve done is pass students out of College Algebra who still don’t qualify to take College Algebra. Instead, the improved scores are celebrated.

     Much like with the self-selected students, there’s no control group, no set of students outside the program to compare test scores to. For all I know, a typical student that passes College Algebra has a 30 point improvement on that placement test, or that simply taking the test repeatedly will cause a 30 point improvement. That would make the co-requisite students worse off than if they’d never entered the program…no control group means there’s no way to know. It would cost a hundred bucks or so to double-administer those tests to a class or two of students, but I guess there’s hardly any money left over after the many thousands of dollars spent implementing the program and pitching it to various states.

     Even without a single control, there’s another issue here. Only the students that pass the course are re-taking the placement test, and yet it’s taken as evidence of improvement when the average score goes up. The students that failed the course don’t retake the test, so we don’t have their scores. You take out all the F students, and the average grade increases...and this is presented as legitimate improvement. Practically everyone on the stage selling this to us has a Ph.D., a research degree, in Education or Administration, and none of them see even this issue.

     An empowered faculty would point and laugh at administrators using such poorly compiled statistics to justify a major re-working of programs. Instead, the faculty sit quietly and take it. One brave soul asks “How do you expect us to teach the college material with the unprepared students sitting right there, doing nothing?”…the people giving the pitch mumble out a response that the answer will come later, but it never does.

     Someone with a legitimate research degree would be embarrassed to present this isolated statistic, a single uncontrolled test score, as useful, and yet, one of the pitchers of the new plan says she’s studied it and is sure it works. She proudly tells us she’s an actual mathematics professor, instead of saying that her doctorate is actually in Education. Administrators in suits just stood there as she “misled” us, though some of them had to know the truth. She gave no hint at all of her degree in the presentation or in any of the handout materials, as though she were embarrassed about it. I had to scramble around online to find that detail out. I found something else online, too.

 

Faculty: “Did you see her students’ comments on Ratemyprofessors.com?”

Me: “Crap, I was going to tell you about it. I didn’t think anyone else goes there.”

Faculty: “I thought I’d do some investigation.”

--Faculty are not stupid, we know better than to take anything from administrators at face value. We also know when administration wants us to “say something about” their new ideas, they only do so because it’s easier to cram things down our throat if we open our mouths first.

 

     My online search also found what students had to say about her, and indirectly the program, at Ratemyprofessors.com. Despite the professor’s presentation claiming great teaching skills, she has miserable ratings there. Now, I grant, only the most irate students would go to an online site and post their complaints, but after being forced to watch videos of testimonials from students about how life-changing—I’m not exaggerating!—the new program is, it’s fair to present testimonials biased in the other direction.

     She’s rated in several categories at Ratemyprofessors.com, but “easiness” is by far her best category. Granted, “easiness” isn’t on a collegiate evaluation of teaching form, but this website caters towards student desires. An administration that was actually curious about challenging students-- critical to education!--would have such a question on the evaluations, and it’s very telling that there is no such question on the official evaluations. Here are some abbreviated quotes, see if you can spot any red flags:

“Hardly a teacher at all. All she does is talk, talk, talk. The second day of class she taught us how to turn on our calculator. The tests don't make sense.”

“HORRIBLE!!! she is so rude and doesnt seem like she cares about anyone including her TAs. She acts as if she is better than everyone and her lectures are completely WORTHLESS. STAY AWAY!”

“A lot of people don't go to the lectures because they are extremely boring and attendence doesn't count but sometest questions ome straight from lecture. The labs are never fully coordinated. Tests are all about theory more than solving problems. Use the answer choices to solve test questions.”

“Her tests are always about concepts with no actual calculations of answers.”

“Her tests are all on principles and alghorithms. There were hardly any problems you had to actually solve”

“stay away from this teacher taking this class with her will be the biggest waste you will ever come across”

“Wholly education/grant-funded class. Does a horrible job explaining in class. Try to get a different professor unless you enjoy being taught like you're in middle school.”

     Not a single student gave a positive review, not one, and many professors at Ratemyprofessors.com have positive reviews. Looking too closely at negative student evaluations usually isn’t a good idea, but when the same specific complaints keep coming up over the course of years, that usually means there’s some truth to it. Complaints like this had to have turned up in student evaluations administered at her school; administration only looks at passing rates. In reviewing those quotes, a reasonable conclusion about her higher passing rates would be that she gives easy multiple choice tests where you can get the answer merely by reading the questions, the program has nothing to do with it. All administration saw was higher retention, a complaint like “waste of time” is insignificant next to the only goal of merit to an administrator.

     After the pitch, the head pitchman tells us that when this program is tried at other institutions, retention rates vary from 25% to 77%; in other words, outside of controlled situations, the co-requisite plan doesn’t work. He asks that if we get a high retention, we should contact him and tell us what we did so they can put that in their recommendations for the program. Some faculty drove hundreds of miles to be told how to implement this plan (sic) to improve retention, and the people pitching it already know it doesn’t work.

     Year after year, colleges cycle through one plan to improve retention after another, as apparently clueless administration buys into one hokum plan after another. Never is it considered that maybe you can’t teach people  that don’t want to learn, and that simply not accepting such people in the first place would help far more than admitting anything with a pulse and then optimizing the best way to extract the maximum amount of money from the victims of this “higher education” scheme.

     The Cycle of Remediation:

1.       College courses with failing students in them have “low” retention.

2.       To improve retention, failing students are pre-identified and shuffled off to remediation.

3.       To improve retention in remedial courses, various plans are tried, but for reasons administration cannot fathom, remedial students still fail more than non-remedial students.

4.       To improve retention, remedial students are put back in college courses.

5.       Return to 1.

     A remedial course, years ago, was an important tool, helping a student who just had a few weaknesses preventing him from going into higher education. Administration has taken that tool and turned it into a weapon capable of channeling herds of suckers into “higher education,” where they are fleeced in the short term, paying way too much for courses that will benefit them far too little, and slaughtered later when the loan bills come due.

      So we’re back to the question: incompetence, or malice? Do the people running higher education know the evil they do, or not?

Think about it.

 

 

 

 

 

The Remedial Disconnect

By Professor Doom

     The people doing the actual teaching in higher education know that the biggest problem is in remediation. Simple statements of fact: more than 90% of community college work is at the high school (i.e., remedial) level or lower. More than 90% of remedial students fail to get at least a 2 year degree within 3 years. Those are only two dots, and yet administrators and educationists are simply unable to connect them. 

     A large percentage of community college students fail to perform academically, almost certainly because they’re at the school simply to get a check. Just a bit of effort to cut down on fraud would go a long way to fixing this glaring problem.

      A recent article at Insider Higher Ed just glosses over these facts, and instead suggests the way to deal with remediation is…wait for it…wait for it…to pour more money into the system. Despite being written by an educationist, the article is fairly coherent, although quite ignorant of the reality of what’s going on in higher education.

     Let’s have a bit of a dissection of what’s said:

“require that they address non-academic issues that may prevent students from succeeding,”

     This is an important problem; many of the students in my remedial classes had to deal with legal issues (often drug related, but sometimes actually criminal, like…scamming for government checks), or were pregnant, or had multiple infants to take care of. The article doesn’t offer suggestions, and I just don’t know how to address students that have to spend time in jail (or at least the courts) during the semester. I’ve always been willing to work with students that have tiny children to deal with, but ultimately, the material has been watered down to the sub-high school level, and assignments are basically non-existent. Content free, assignment free courses are the norm at many schools, and that should go a long way to facilitating success. What else is there to do?

 “improve the quality of instruction at all levels,”

Certainly this is a nice, obvious suggestion. Seriously, is anyone advocating reducing the quality of instruction? The educationist here seems to be unaware admin is very motivated to pay as little as possible (every dollar not spent on instruction is a dollar available for administrative salary, after all), and knows they can pay much less when they hire dubiously qualified instructors.

“ revise financial aid policies, “

“Revise”? Holy crap, even mainstream media acknowledges as much as 25% of student grant money is given fraudulently, and my own eyes would put it somewhat higher (but still somewhat below half). This is the only hint in the whole article that, maybe, the problem with remedial students failing is because…they’re not there to learn.

“provide better advising to students at risk,”

Again, I’m glad to see the educationist isn’t advising to provide worse advising, but I have to admit, for an educationist to even state what is obvious to normal people is pretty good. Thing is, years ago, students had to see an advisor before they could sign up for classes. Now, in many institutions, students can just take whatever, as long as the course has no pre-requisites, and most courses, especially the courses admin likes to offer, have no pre-requisites. So it’s quite common to have students with many dozens of hours of introductory courses, and with no actual skills that anyone is willing to pay for.

Administration killed the advisor system, because without advisors students could hurt themselves throwing away vast sums of loan money on pointless courses. How does the educationist not know this?

“ integrate instruction and support services,”

Again, no kidding. It’s funny, attempts to do this have been completely disastrous. How does he not know this?

“teach college success skills,"

Good advice…but if you’d just get rid of the scammers, that would do far more good than adding yet more empty credit hours in worthless “college success” courses that will be of no value when it comes time to get a job.

“invest in professional development"

Oh, please no. Year after year, I’ve been subjected to professional development by educationists and diversity specialists. It gives me great anecdotes, but I’d belong in Hell if I actually bought into that crap material.

Having actually taught remedial courses, it seems so obvious to me: just get rid of all the scammers, and you’ll see massive improvement in passing rates, and you’ll see it quickly.

Let me demonstrate. Let’s suppose we have 100 remedial students. Basically 50% pass the course, the other 50% don’t try (and are almost certainly there for the check). Let’s say 10 of these 100 students will actually get a degree within 3 years (I emphasize, this is better than what real data says what will happen). That’s a 10% graduation rate.

But get rid of the obvious scammers right away? Now you’ve got 10 of 50 students actually getting a degree. That’s a 20% graduation rate. Hey, I’ve just doubled the effectiveness of remediation, and that’s without changing a thing.

The only reason 50% pass remedial is because standards have been lowered so far that students can literally accidentally pass these courses; put real standards in and make the courses legitimate, identify the fraudsters more easily, and there will be further improvement.

But, for some reason, the article never mentions this stupid-obvious thing to try.

Instead, the article goes on in some detail about all the ways we could spend more money on an education system that is mostly bogus, on hiring more administrators to enforce more bogus standards, and on having more evaluation methods of the bogus remedial courses.

As is so often the case, what an educationist has to say is massively disconnected from the reality of what’s going on. Get rid of the fraud, and you’ll do far more for education than yet another hi-falutin’ untested theory.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

Revisiting The Remediation Scam

By Professor Doom

     I’ve written before on the remediation scam. The vast majority of classes on campus, at least community college campuses, are remedial, pre-high school coursework (with the high school coursework most of my readers would be familiar with being now regarded as college coursework).

     I’ve shown many times that 90% of the academic coursework on community college campuses is pre-college, with much of it 6^th grade level or lower. It’s well known and quite documented that 90% of remedial students fail to get even a 2 year degree in 3 years. Despite what admin says, you can’t make up six to nine years of public school in two semesters.

    Advocates for a Better College (ABC) is a Facebook page, with posts mostly in protest of the frauds at Reedley College, but it also focuses other horrors of higher education. Naturally, there is no particular name associated with page: we all know that if you’re going to point out the frauds of higher education today, you need to do so anonymously.

     ABC posted the stats for remediation in California. I’ve done much research on remediation, and California is representative of much of the United States in this regard (there are a couple of northern states in the central US where the remedial students would be considered college students anywhere else, but these states have such small populations that they are just special cases).

      Like any honest educator, ABC looks are remediation, realizes something is wrong, and knows the obvious way to fix it:

The issue of remedial education ties into the census day and financial aid scam. Essentially, remedial students are recruited to fill seats, often with huge grants, yet the failure rate of remedial students is staggering.
Federal and state grants should not be given to individuals who are not academically prepared for a college level education, nor should class registration favor remedial students, regardless of whether they are returning for another semester/year.

     Administration is paid based on the size of the campus, not on the caliber or success of the students. Even schools with legitimate coursework still have vast halls and endless sections of remedial coursework. This coursework is in violation of Federal law, but the money, the huge sums of money, administrators get for selling these courses make such considerations irrelevant. The coursework is paid for by student loans and the Pell Grant scam…and these students wander from campus to campus, getting this money, giving most of it to the colleges, and taking the scraps home. It’s an open, everyday fraud on most every campus in this country.

     But let’s pretend it’s not a fraud. How much good is remediation doing, under the assumption this is a good faith effort to help people? Let’s look at the stats:

In Math, at 1 level below, 57.4% do not complete a degree/certificate, or become transfer prepared, at 2 levels below, 57.4% do not complete a degree/certificate, or become transfer prepared, 3 levels below, 68.6% do not complete a degree/certificate, or become transfer prepared, at 4 levels below, 74.6% do not complete a degree/certificate, or become transfer prepared.*

     Allow me to explain the above. “College Algebra” is the math that was (and is at many schools) offered to 10^th grade students in much of the country, or at least by the 11^th grade. I tutor high school students as well as teach at a university; I’ve seen with my own eyes that “College Algebra” is the same course as the early high school algebra.

      Then we have the “below” courses, and at many schools, these courses are broken down in many ways. Each “below” is roughly two grade levels (this may seem odd, but the gentle reader should understand that the public schools do an abhorrent job of covering material, and so, indeed, what even a fake college does in 4 months is comparable to two public school years).

      Thus the “4 levels below” course referenced above is roughly 2^nd grade or 3^rd grade level work. Again, I’ve taught such courses at the community college, where I try to get the ideas across of how to add and subtract whole numbers, for example. I do the best I can, but attendance is poor; for some reason, almost nobody shows up once the checks are distributed. Admin is happy to tell me, repeatedly, the reason is because I’m a terrible teacher…but I notice attendance is better during semesters where there’s a delay in handing the checks to the students. Until the delayed check day arrives, of course, as then classes empty out, not to fill again until next semester.

      Administration has enforced these courses, because they can grow the school this way, but the success rates, as given above, are awful. Everyone who walks onto campus gets tossed into a course somewhere, even people who have no interest in education (and I’m making no judgement there). Administration helps them with the forms, and takes a huge cut of the loan/grant money. 

      Let’s see the odds of a student enrolling in a “4 levels below” course, actually making it through College Algebra:

     As above, this student has only a 25.6% change of making it through that first course. After doing so, he’ll have a 31.6% chance of making it past the “3 levels below” course. 

      Just two more courses to go before finally getting to an actual college course!

      Each of these two more courses pass 42.6% of their students. Assuming good faith that this really is how it works, then, we have the following chance that, after 2 years of “college,” the student will be able to legitimately begin his 2 year degree program:

0.256 * 0.316 * 0.426 * 0.426 = 0.015.

      So we can reasonably guess around 1.5% of these lowest level remedial students (and keep in mind, this level, the lowest common denominator, has a large market share, to put things in terms an administrator can understand).

      That’s just the chance of making it to College Algebra! Realize on many campuses, this course is the “impediment to graduation” (as a deanling put it), the hardest course on a community college campus. Perhaps 50% of students pass College Algebra, and then breeze through the other courses. Hmm, now we’re at 0.7% success rate. Gosh, that’s the kind of rate we see on successful community college campuses. I’ve assumed (falsely) that there’s actual independence in the chance of making through each course, but bear with me; no matter how you make this calculation the end result is always that the chances of a student successfully getting through all this are slim.

     ABC posts the success rates for other remedial courses in English, but…yeah, they’re a disaster as well.

For every seat occupied by a failing remedial student, the taxpayer pays the freight not only for the attendance number on Census Day, but also in financial aid grants in the Tens of Thousands of dollars per semester. The college(s) should not have any remedial courses. They should be institutions for higher education, not basic education.

      And so, I revisit the horrible disaster of remedial “education” and see nothing has changed.  Every educator involved with remedial education recommends that we stop wasting immense resources in this way. But the failure just continues to get bigger and bigger.

      This is no surprise, as the people that run higher education are paid very, very, well to see that this level of failure continues to grow.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com