College Math readiness hits a 14-year low

A greater percentage of U.S. high-school graduates who took the ACT college-entrance exam aren’t ready for college-level coursework, with math readiness at a 14-year low.

ACT on Wednesday released its annual report, the Condition of College and Career Readiness, that shows only 40% of 2018 graduates taking the ACT met a benchmark indicating they could succeed in a first-year college algebra class. That is down from 41% last year and a high of 46% in 2012.

The percentage of students meeting college-ready benchmarks dropped in all subjects tested—English, math, reading and science.

“Math specifically concerns me in a society that’s becoming more and more technological,” said ACT Chief Executive Marten Roorda. “The economy needs more students with STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) education, and good math skills are vital to the STEM orientation. There is a high risk for the U.S. economy coming to a slowdown or a standstill.”

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The dumbing of society keeps creeping in!?

what's considered a first year college algebra class? linear algebra?

Probably precalculus.

maths is a funny one.

here in ireland we just made the maths leaving cert exam easier and gave bonus points to students that attempted the higher level paper: thus jacking up the numbers.

actually teaching the subject is a big problem. most that are very good at maths don't teach. here (at least when i was being educated) maths was mostly thought with shouting, frustration from all parties involved and rote learning. no one came out of that a winner *shudder*.

colleges here basically assume that, after 12-ish years of maths education students can add, subtract, multiply and divide and put maths classes into courses that need it. if they actually got strict on the maths requirement then they wouldnt get enough students.

i have no idea how to improve this. is maths one of those subjects were you just need to be wired up correctly for it?

It comes down to how the individual learns/likes-to-be-taught.

I hated high-school maths; do this, do that, don't ask why or what it means, just do it. No wonder I did shit, just barely passing each year.

Move onto University where I had to do advanced maths for cryptography (I was shit scared), and I never thought I'd graduate. But the lecture style, with history, what it all meant and the breakdown of it meant I passed with high marks, definitely at the top 10% of 40 students or so.

I blame math word problems. You know: Joe leaves on a train at 7:14, Tracy at 7:21 blah blah blah.

My 6th grade math teacher was great. She would do things like have us figure out how much water would fit in an aquarium, and then we'd fill it up to see. Or figure the weight of a bag of jelly beans by just weighing 5 beans, then we got to eat them. Was fun.

I don’t think it’s dumbing down, I think expectations are up. In business school I had to take calculus and finite mathematics to graduate whereas in my dad’s college days they never got further than the algebra I took freshman year of HS unless you were majoring in engineering.

I personally think they had a better system. Calculus has been useless to me even in software development. I would have much rather taken game theory or a deeper statistics course, something that is cross-functional and useful regardless of the specialization I had gone in.

K-12 education in the US is pretty terrible on average. I was very lucky to have good math teachers, for the most part, especially in high school, but others not so much. It does not help that math is generally loathed, and most of what they teach you is not needed at all.

I think they need to start teaching business-math as standard in high school, at least then you could see how math has everyday application. How mortgages work, why you should pay your credit card on time, how stock investments work, and so on.

I stopped taking math seriously when they started teaching us imaginary numbers and stuff like that.

Yeah, some choice would be nice in the matter. In my high school, it was algebra, geometry, algebra 2/trig, and then pre-calc. If you were good they had AP Calculus which my sister took, and that shit was nuts.

I would have much preferred some different material after Algebra and Geometry; I think I got about 99% of my useful math skills from those two courses, having other options would have been nice. Dimensional Analysis (i.e. solving really complex word problems, such as "how much steam does it take to melt 20 pounds of ice at -10 C and turn it into boiling water") would have been useful given my interests, and as I said above kids are not taught anything about balancing checkbooks, paying loans with interest, and making investments so a business math course would have been great.

Honestly I think a class that uses Kerbal Space Program and Factorio to teach math equations would be pretty cool, too. "Today kids we are going to blast off of Kerbal and fly to the Mun, how much Delta V do we need?"

Meh. My kid is one of those in the 40% and probably much higher up.

I once tried to tutor a kid, they didn't have math books, just a series of small workbooks written horribly like their some lowest bidder charter school bullshit. Not surprised to hear this. Math is easy with a good textbook. It teaches you everything you need to know in baby steps. Chapter 1.1, gives you type of math problem and several examples of mathmatics approaches to solve them, then you apply that knowledge to maybe three or four dozen questions that proceed it until you got it down, then move onto section 1.2, rinse and repeat. Any educational system that deviates this is just asking for failure.

When you bring in politic crap into the education system instead of education..not surprise.

The way math was/is taught is definitely counterintuitive. Whenever people see that, then when math begins a more “correct” approach to being taught, then students will succeed, and use mathematics in the real world to solve real problems.

In the UK, kids are generally getting smarter when it comes to maths. So it's surprising to see the opposite result in the US. Which probably says more about Americans than it does about millennials.

(Long, no TL;DR)

I feel the system started to take on shit on kids when Bush Jr implemented the "No Kid Left Behind" crap.

My younger brother, he started high school after I graduated and started my freshman year at U of M (which I enjoyed the experience, but so much of my freshmen classes, I learned the things they were teaching from middle school up through high school - so much wasted time and money). I stopped by home one weekend to pick up mail....you know, eat better food and such. When I walked in my brother had his head in his hands and cussing at his math homework. I asked him what he was working on and he said he had no idea. He said he spends, along with half his class, several hours after school in the math tutoring room because no one in his class understands what they're trying to teach. So he asked me for help. I looked at the chapter he was on and saw what he was doing and asked him why he's not using the FOIL method.

He looked at me like I was fucking retarded and said, "What the hell is FOIL?"

I looked at one of his problems and quickly wrote out the answer for it. He was flabbergasted that I could just write out the answer that fast. I asked him to show me how he would work the next problem. He started doing some weird shit with the number, that to me, made no sense whatsoever. He got a few steps into the problem and said he doesn't understand what to do next. I asked him what the hell he was doing and he said doing it like they were teaching it in class and how they show you how to do it in the book. I looked through the steps they took in the book and I told him all he needs to do is FOIL to get the answer. You don't need to do the dozen plus steps they want you to do, it's too confusing.

I walked him through how to FOIL (First, Outside, Inside, Last) on 2 of his problems. That's all it took for him and he understood how to solve the work in his book.

For example, if this was one of his problems, I showed him how to find the answer by multiplying using FOIL:

(2x + 3)(3x – 1)

1. First: (2x)(3x) = 6x²
2. Outside: (2x)(-1) = -2x
3. Inside: (3)(3x) = 9x
4. Last: (3)(-1) = -3
5. You get: 6x² - 2x +9x - 3
6. Combine any like terms (if possible): 6x² +7x - 3

He started to rattle off the answers in his math homework. He then explained to me how they got "new" math books and how the teachers were trying to show them how to do "new math" and no one understood it, not even some of the teachers. They were getting graded on a sliding scale and generally the highest grade anyone in his class got was a B on tests. Most of them were getting Cs and Ds on tests, but with the sliding grades they were doing it looked like they were all getting Cs or better.

I felt bad for him. I flipped through his book some more and the way they were trying to teach math was just straight up, fucked up. He struggled through Algebra and then got through Geometry pretty easy and he struggled with Algebra II and stopped after that. This took place almost 18 years ago and it hasn't improved at all to my knowledge.

My daughter, when in 2nd grade, they started to learn how to subtract lager numbers (hundreds, thousands and such) and she was having some issues with it. I had her walk me through one of her problems and she was adding up numbers and writing down numbers that didn't make sense to me, then after she added up all these numbers, she then took some of the digits they gave and wrote them down to get her answer for a subtraction problem.....WTF??? It was the damnedest thing I had seen from a 7 year old doing math. She was struggling to get the answers correct and I couldn't understand what she was even doing and why. I took a good hour or more to show her how to subtract the large numbers from each other and to solve them by using subtraction so she could get her answer. It took a while, but she eventually got it.

I don't know what the hell they're teaching kids these days, but it seems broke as hell and overly complicated. I can understand why kids may be falling behind in math. After working a tech support job for about 4 years, I got to deal with people all over the US when they'd call with issues with their POS system. So many stores, when their registers are down, the high school kids working there couldn't solve any kind of math problem without a calculator. If there was no calculator, they wouldn't do the math because they didn't know. Even with a calculator some of them couldn't figure out how to charge tax to sales.....it's just sad. I had to help people over the phone with math while trying to get them to do tasks to help me solve the problem of why their system has gone down.....I don't miss that job. I just makes me wonder how these people will get anywhere in life without knowing basic math. I didn't start using a calculator until Algebra II and we got those fancy TI-85 graphing calculator. I spent more time programming games on the thing than I did actually using it for Algebra II or Pre-Calc.

Glad to know common core has done a great job. Can't teach people the short cut with out first teaching people the fundamentals. But hey welcome to america the land of the lazy.

@neatfeatguy: I cant quote all of it, its too long.

But they try to "improve" maths over the years, to make it different and attempt to make it seem new.

But you don't improve maths, you just teach the same way, even if its boring and repetitive for teachers, you've probably heard the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) principle, its what everyone needs to go back.

My high school, I came into it when they went from having a 7 period quarter to a 4 period. You had less classes to take, but instead of taking classes all year, you'd do 4 classes one semester and 4 different classes the second semester.

We'll say freshman year you had these 4 classes your first semester:

1. Algebra 1
2. Science
3. English (9th grade)
4. Gym

You'd spend 4 months or so doing those classes. Then when second semester starts you'd take:

1. Language 1 (some foreign language class)
2. Social Studies
3. Open Period
4. Some computer class

You'd spend the other half of your school year doing those 4 classes. Then you have summer break (roughly 2.5 months off). Then you go back to school and you start another 4 period session of classes.

1. English (10th grade)
2. Social Studies
3. Science
4. Open period

4 months or so here, then on to your second semester:

1. Geometry
2. Gym
3. Language 2
4. some other class

As you can see here. Someone could take math their very first semester in high school and then they may not take another math class for almost a full year later. Kids forget this stuff because it's not a constant class they're taking. Same with the foreign language classes - they can be so far apart that you don't remember anything.

Combine that with the fact that they wanted to start teaching "new math" with the No Child Left Behind Act.....it was a clusterfuck for kids and it doesn't feel like it's improved at all.

Math can be fun, though. My group of friends, most of us went through calc. At lunch one day someone was talking about that lizard they were researching on for science class, the one that can run across the top of water. Then one of us wondered what our 6'2" friend that weighed about 105 pounds, how fast he'd have to run to run on top of water. So we started using our math. We had to figure out the speed the lizard ran, based on the surface area of his feet, how much he weighed and how long his foot was in contact with the water. Then we had to take our friends weight, measure out the surface area of his feet and we ended up finding out that he'd have to run around 74 MPH (if memory serves me right) to run across the surface of water. Now that I think about this, I wonder how many kids these days could do something like this without a calculator? I couldn't do it anymore, most of the stuff I know is lost to me since I don't use it.

That has definitely been my experience in college, not just with math but with science courses as well. I've had exactly one teacher who really understood how to teach the material, two who were pretty good, and four who were terrible for different reasons. I think the common factor with those four, though, is that none of them knew how to teach. Two were obviously brilliant in their respective fields, but one just stood up at the whiteboard and repeated the textbook and the other just tried to get us to memorize everything by rote. The other two apparently thought that trying to micromanage their students' studying like helicopter parents was the correct way to get them to succeed. Again, great at working in their field, not so great at actually teaching the material. They definitely need to start training teachers to teach rather than just hiring people who know the material.

And I definitely don't think people need to be wired for it, that's a myth. Some people pick it up better, which leads to another problem. When teachers see students who digest the material easily they tend to give them more attention, when really they should be paying more attention to students who don't pick it up right away. What students really need is twofold. One, they need someone with a flexible mindset who can adjust their teaching style to students with differing needs. Two, they need to be supported and encouraged. Some of these topics are difficult, and when students start experiencing trouble is exactly when they need to engage with the material more. Unfortunately, at that point they usually start thinking they aren't wired for it or something like that, get discouraged, and seeing teachers spending more time with the students who always have the answers in class just reinforces those negative views. Math is super simple once you know how to do it, even advanced calculus. When you don't understand derivatives they're infuriating, once you do they're as easy as basic algebra. Literally everyone without a serious mental impairment is capable of understanding first year calculus.

I know a lot of people who did poorly in H.S but well in college. I know a girl who only did math models in H.S but went to O.T school and a guy who did a masters in Biology but got below average grades in this class.

I also know a lot of people who did well in H.S (mostly females) but did poorly in college. Quite a few straight A students ended up majoring in Psy., marketing or family relations and never did a post grad.

Well after hearing all the news about universities in the USA becoming echo chambers and politicized, and hearing about the kind of education my father once enjoyed and comparing that to the education I received through official channels, I would not really be surprised to hear that the educational standards are gone. I mean it sounds like the fundamental priorities are gone. It sounds like the intention of education has changed.