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The agony of placement
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Teaching
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By kroth
Posted Thu Sep 23, 2004 at 05:26:30 AM PDT
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The beginning of fall semester is something I must mentally block out after it's over, since every fall I'm surprised by the number of students who feel they have not been placed into the correcct math class. Is there really a good way to tell if students are properly placed?
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| I teach at a small liberals arts school where our students cary in background wildly. Because of our locale and our mission as a university, we have some students with weak academic backgrounds and many first generation college students. This leads us to offer math courses in the calculus sequence from Basic Algebra to Calculus. There are non calculus sequence options, as well there should be, but they do not cause as much placement hassle.
We place students based on their standardized test scores, high school grades, and math courses taken in high school. We do not force students to follow their placement, but do encourage them to follow it.
Of course since this placement method does not quite asses the math skills of the students directly, some students get misplaced. The typical student who thinks they are misplaced, assumes that they were placed too low in the sequence. My typical adivce is this, sit in both classes for the first week and then talk to the professors and decide. However this has backfired hearvily this year, in a student who was convinced he could do calculus, but probably should be in precalculus, if not algebra. Also I feel like some of the students given this choice take precalculus, whether they capable of calculus or not, becuase it is "easier".
Our school has had a placement test in the past, but found it ineffective, since the students didn't study for it (I have noticed the same problem when I give quizzes on prerequisite skills in my classes)
What do you do for placement? How well does it work? What do you tell a student who feels they were misplaced?
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