Universities 'dumbing down on maths' to fill places

British education is tearing apart along class lines.

Oxbridge, the Russell group and a handful of other institutions are setting ever higher entry requirements and looking to break away from the existing system by promoting the IB or new qualifications like the Cambridge Pre-U. They have no qualms about stating that A-Level syllabuses are being dumbed down. Oxford and Cambridge maintain lists of A-level subjects that they do not recognise. Most of their prospective intake comes from independent, grammar and wealthier comprehensive schools with the resources and confidence to guide students towards the right qualifications (increasingly something other than A-levels) and coach them through application and interview.

Most other universities are engaged in a mad rush to the bottom, competing to fill the maximum number of places at the maximum fee at minimum cost. Their main appeal is to working and lower-middle class students who may not be confident in their ability to get a place at university, who are unlikely to have received any useful guidance in their application and who are foolish enough to believe that "a degree is a degree". Standards at secondary level are falling, as are contact hours at most universities. With a strong financial incentive to maximise intake, the results are obvious and inevitable.

The reputation of these universities is plummeting amongst employers, who are seeing increasing numbers of graduates and even postgraduates without basic skills in reading and writing. This is not hyperbole - I regularly deal with correspondence from recent graduates and often have to make follow-up phone calls because their written English incomprehensible.

Crisis is too mild a word for the current state of HE.

I'm not sure this should be posted here where most won't understand the context.

In the UK (bar Scotland), if you plan to go to University, you do A Levels in 3-4 subjects between the ages of 16 and 18. This means you need to make key choices that go towards which subject you study at University at the age of 16. Many students either haven't decided on their degree subject or make uninformed choices.

To reflect that reality, Universities are loosening their subject admission requirements and putting the prerequisite material in the University course instead.

Personally, I believe that A Levels should be reformed to reduce early specialisation.

Suprised? Not I.

While studying at the University of Wollongong, they were dumbing down the computer science courses to improve pass rates and keep more students (who probably shouldn't be doing Comp Sc anyway).

Two of my first year courses with C++ were split into three after I completed them with the harder content removed (such as abstract classes, inheritance, etc).

A lot of Universities are run like businesses now, rather than academic centers of excellence (at least in my humble opinion).

I'm surprised that this is considered news, because it's been an observable issue for 15 years or more. As I understand it, when O-Levels were replaced by GCSEs the maths syllabus dropped some of the more challenging areas like calculus, leaving all the study of these areas to the A-Levels. As a result the standard of maths understanding for the university intake generally dropped. Universities made a number of changes to deal with this: they introduced more maths-light degrees (for example, combining some computing content with business management, finance and languages content), some courses increased the amount of maths tuition in the first year, and I believe that some even extended the course to four years to give students time to 'get up to speed'.

That said, I wouldn't class this as 'dumbing down'. They're reacting to a change in the tuition that happens prior to university entry that they have little control over. No one is saying that they're dropping the standard of the teaching that the universities are actually delivering, so the ability of a physics or computer science graduate today should be broadly similar to that from 10 or 20 years ago. What seems to be changing is the amount of work that the universities need to do to get students from a lower ability at entrance to the same level at graduation. That, and a migration by the students towards courses which are lighter in maths.

Caveat: it's 15 years since I worked at a university, so I have no inside knowledge of what's going on these days.

I don't like the phrase "dumbing down". Based on the article, they are loosening their admission requirements, and seem to be allocating extra coursework to help students catch up.

I think that what matters is if the students manage to acquire the necessary skills after they do the mathematics coursework (which many should have done at school). There are probably a significant number of students who thrive after they catch up - implying that they are "dumb" is quite offensive.

The submitted article is about the situation in Britain, and the situation in the United States is similar.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2010-05-11-remedial-c...

http://www.all4ed.org/about_the_crisis/students/college_acce...

Providing remedial (secondary-school level) mathematics courses for college and university students is a big business in United States higher education.

http://www.aleks.com/

http://bluehawk.monmouth.edu/~bgold/DvMthIn.html

It's commendable that higher education teachers give their students a second chance to learn mathematics that young people could learn in primary or secondary education, but even better would be for young people to have opportunity to learn mathematics at a younger age.

http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/NoticesAMS2011.pdf

http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/Lisbon2010_3.pdf

http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/CommonCoreIV.pdf

http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf

Grade inflation after entry into higher education

http://gradeinflation.com/

has been going on in the United States for quite a while.

Warwick university actually increased their requirements between 08 and 09. (I'm not sure if there's been any changes since.) To get a place in 08, you needed A's in maths and further maths at A-level, and either two other A grades (NB. most people only take three A-levels) or a B together with a grade 2 in a STEP paper (a more difficult math paper used by Warwick and Cambridge for entrance requirements). The 08 year was unexpectedly crowded, so in 09 the AAAA option was dropped.

They're also making the course itself harder in at least some respects. There's a second year business module which is popular with third year mathematicians because it's easy marks; as of next year, it won't be an option to them.

On the other hand, I've had a lecturer say that when he taught a module to biologists, several of them didn't understand how to work with the relation "V = IR", and he got negative feedback for making the module too math-heavy.

In Ireland, our situation is very much reflected in this, only that students must study some level of maths up to the Leaving certificate (A-Level).

The problem is that there is no real initiative to do higher level maths unless your course requires it. This means that there is a tiny proportion of students who take the higher paper. While most others sit an ordinary level paper, the difference in difficulty between the two is massive, and leads to a lot of people with a below useful level of maths, and universities must really be struggling.

Some initiatives have been started to make Maths a worthwhile option, by changing its worth to the overall mark, but the reality is that it is a subject that is largely rejected by the student body due to the fact that there is a "I hate Maths" mentality and the fact that the workload to do well is significantly more than other areas.

I used to be pretty involved with student government when I was an undergrad. a few of our first year courses had a 70-80% failure rate, which the profs and higher year students supported (of course) and which the administration despised (of course).

the course was introduction to discrete math. it wasn't a very hard class, but most people who enter computer science in first year have no idea what computer science is, so this was a big shock.

England has multiple exam boards which offer the same qualifications, and compete with each other for business. Total WTF.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/aug/25/teachers-cho... http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/may/26/exam-boards-...

When I was in highschool, I actually couldn't imagine how anyone could enjoy maths as a subject. Even though I was quite good at it, relatively (managed to get A's).

I finished high school in England a few years back, but education here is pretty bad. The whole lowering the boundaries thing is very true, the school I went to had a 20% pass rate the year before me, last year it was at almost 90%. They're just adding new "easier" qualifications and "easier" subjects to improve the pass rates but the quality of education remains the same.

Luckily failing high school doesn't have any real bearing on life.

The average human brain has shrunk by 20% in size since the last 10 000 years. Thats the size of a tennis ball, or the size of an australopithecus afarensis brain.