MHC2011

It's so true. People think of these courses as only being offered at community colleges, but the reality is, they're offered all over the place, particularly in math. I was even flipping through Smith's catalogue recently to find info for someone and saw some listed there.

I was a teaching assistant in our English department while I was at my community college. We had students who had gone through some of the most exceptional public school systems in the country, not to mention students who had gone to name private schools and were enrolled at the CC for financial reasons, who couldn't write a college-level paper to save their lives. When we'd try to explain to them that the silly 5-paragraph format is NOT what you do in college, they'd complain that that's all they were taught in high school. And forget any expectations of them knowing how to do MLA or APA citation format. It was awful. College papers are not book reports, nor do they expect you to write a thesis paragraph backed up by three specific points. And don't get me going on the complete lack of understanding when it comes to being able to understand, much less execute, literary analysis and criticism. But there's something really wrong when students like myself who never went to high school can get perfect scores on Accuplacer, while students who went to exceptional, competitive high schools get placed into the developmental courses.

Edit to add:

That doesn't solve anything. Aside from the fact that all students are entitled to a quality education, some of those students "least likely to succeed" are still going to pursue higher education, and if we provide less funding to prepare them, we're just going to make the problem worse. I agree that it makes sense to separate students out and provide different levels of instruction, but you can't abandon the goal of making all students prepared for college in some manner. If you start having dramatically varying degrees of high school rigor, you're just devaluing everyone's diploma.