About 40 percent of recent public high school graduates, college professors and employers agree that graduates are not prepared for college or work when they leave high school, according to a national survey released Feb. 7.
According to the survey, completed for Achieve, Inc., a group created by the nation’s governors and business leaders, 42 percent of those graduates now in college and 41 percent not in college said that they are not prepared for the math skills they now need. Fifty percent of college instructors and 41 percent of employers agreed.
Several Ohio State professors said that they often find this to be the case.
Victor Ferdinand, an assistant professor of mathematics, teaches a basic college math class at OSU. He said that students often struggle with math because they take the wrong approach to the subject.
“In my opinion, why people come with poor math skills is that they try to look at mathematics as rules to memorize or facts to memorize,” Ferdinand said. “They don’t understand the concepts. What they learn is imitating the teacher, not the skills.”
Darry Andrews, program director for the OSU Mathematics and Statistics Learning Center, said that mathematics is one of the more challenging subjects for any student.
“I think that’s because the requirements of what is needed to succeed here at OSU is not quite understood by students,” Andrews said. “They’re moving from the minor leagues to the major leagues and there are adjustments that need to be made.”
Another problem area found by the study was the quality of writing displayed by students. According to the findings, 35 percent of the graduates surveyed who are now in college said they felt unprepared for the quality of writing that is expected in college, while 38 percent of those graduates not in college said they felt unprepared for writing in the work force. This compares with 38 percent of employers and 50 percent of college instructors who said students are unprepared.
Kay Halasek, faculty coordinator for OSU’s Writing Center, said that the problem is that students have not had experience with the kinds of writing they are expected to have at the university level.
Most students, she said, come in very prepared to write in the five-paragraph, defined writing style that they learn in high school.
“They are beginning to understand that the kind of preparation that they had wasn’t helpful, and I think that they’re probably right,” Halasek said. “In university writing they are asked to create texts that are not simply defined by that structure, but writings that are aimed at a particular audience with a particular purpose.”
Eddie Singleton, associate director of the First Year Writing Program, said that while some students are more prepared than others, it is not expected that they will know everything covered in their first-year English class before they take it.
Expectations also vary among professors, Singleton said.
“For some it’s about never putting a comma in the wrong place; for others it’s the ability to create a convincing argument,” Singleton said. “We don’t expect students to have it down on the first day.”
Less than 10 percent of OSU students need to take remedial English courses at the Writing Center before they start regular freshman English 110, Singleton said.
In the area of science, 44 percent of those graduates surveyed who are now in college and 51 percent not in college said that high school did not prepare them for the science skills they need, according to the research.
Marita King, an associate professor of chemistry, said that the problems in her class stem from a lack of math skills. She teaches chemistry 101, an elementary chemistry class, and said that the class does not require prior knowledge of chemistry.
“I find myself having to review a lot of simple math and algebra and I find that discouraging,” King said.
The study, conducted by Peter D. Hart Research Associates and Public Opinion Strategies, also found that about 70 percent of college instructors spend at least some class time reviewing skills that they feel students should have developed in high school.
The approach to review taken at OSU, several professors said, is that students must take it upon themselves to get help with old material.
This is mostly due to a lack of class time, Ferdinand said.
“Anymore in a lot of courses I’m teaching we feel that students will go back and do that review if they need to,” Ferdinand said. “With these lower level courses (the schedule) is pretty much set…and with common exam dates we can’t afford to fall behind.”
Ohio Gov. Bob Taft said in his State of the State speech on Feb. 8 that he plans to create a statewide education partnership to, among other things, make high school graduation requirements closer to the requirements necessary to be ready for college.
“A high school diploma should mean that a student is prepared to succeed in college,” Taft said.
The education partnership will also work to get more students to take a rigorous high school curriculum and create incentives for colleges to increase their graduation rates, Taft said.
Part of the problem regarding writing, Halasek said, is that students are mostly being prepared to do well on state proficiency tests.
“Proficiency tests in Ohio exacerbate that problem because teachers know they need to prepare students for that kind of writing, and students do very well with that,” Halasek said. “Now what we need to do in the state of Ohio is that we need to engage students in that other kind of writing in high school, before they come to college.”
The study consisted of a sample of 1,487 public high school graduates from the classes of 2002, 2003, and 2004, 861 of which were currently enrolled in college and 626 who were not. Four hundred employers and 300 college instructors were also interviewed.
