The California community colleges will soon implement changes to STEM math placement in which more students will be enrolled directly in calculus without first taking a longer sequence of lower-level courses such as precalculus and trigonometry.
On Tuesday, during an EdSource roundtable, “A new law aims to expand access to STEM. What troubles some educators?” panelists discussed both the potential upsides and their concerns as Assembly Bill 1705 — the 2022 law requiring the changes — is implemented.
Defenders of the law have argued that its intent is to ensure students can progress more quickly toward transferring to four-year colleges by avoiding long sequences of pre-requisite courses, but some math educators have said they fear more students might fail calculus if they do not first enroll in the preparatory courses.
Tina Akers-Porter is one such math professor at Modesto Junior College. During Tuesday’s roundtable, she shared concerns she has heard from other math professors statewide. The concerns have centered less on the law as intended and more on the implementation guidance from the Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office, which she said “don’t exactly match up well with the law” and are “very strict.”
Akers-Porter pointed out that in order for a precalculus course to continue being offered at a community college, at least 50% of students enrolled in such preparatory classes must be successful in the class. By contrast, just 15% of students directly enrolled in calculus without first taking preparatory courses must successfully pass the class.
Such guidance leads to “one size fits all,” an approach she said “is definitely not in the name of equity.”
John Hetts, executive vice chancellor for the Office of Innovation, Data, Evidence and Analytics Office at the Chancellor’s Office, discussed some of the research he said the implementation guidance is based on.
“At heart, what [the guidelines] are is based on a really substantial set of research across not just California, but across the country, that suggests that the way that we place students into our courses in community colleges vastly underestimated their capacity,” Hetts said.
The implementation guidance includes the offering of support courses, called corequisites, which students will be able to take concurrently with calculus. The additional courses of at most two units are designed to integrate topics from areas like algebra and trigonometry into calculus.
Hetts referred to research that showed corequisites being more effective than prerequisites and that having students repeat courses previously taken does not help them “and, in many cases, makes them less likely to complete the subsequent course.”
Some students, such as panelist Alicia Szutowicz-Fitzpatrick, expressed concerns about the amount of additional time that corequisites might require. As student senate president and a disabled student programs and services peer mentor, Szutowicz-Fitzpatrick said she is worried about how the changes made to STEM math placement will impact financial aid, students’ time and unit loads.
“We’re also worried about the education itself; a lot of support classes are not as supportive as they could be, and it’s just more work,” she said, highlighting a particular concern about how the changes would impact students with disabilities and nontraditional students.
Prior to 2018, community colleges regularly placed students in remedial classes if they were deemed underprepared. Evidence showed an overrepresentation of Black, Latino and Pell Grant students in such courses, most of which could not be transferred to a four-year university.
Assembly Bill 705 was signed into law in 2017 — with a confusingly similar number as the 2022 AB 1705 legislation — with the intention of reducing inequities by placing more students in transfer-level courses.
But racial inequities persisted, leading to the passage of Assembly Bill 1705. This bill, intended to build on AB 705, in part requires colleges to place more STEM students directly into calculus rather than lower-level courses like precalculus or trigonometry.
Tammi Marshall, dean of math, science and engineering at Cuyamaca College, highlighted that since the fall of 2023, her campus has offered calculus plus support for students who have not taken preparatory classes such as precalculus.
“We have seen extreme success,” Marshall said, noting that the previous model of enrolling students in preparatory courses resulted in less than 30% of their students passing calculus in one year.
“The intention was always thinking about students and their success, but we were not supporting students,” said Marshall. “The number of students that would have started in pre-algebra class and ever completed calculus was single digits.”
Since enrolling them directly in calculus, she said, 70% of their students pass calculus in one year.
Panelist Doug Yegge has similarly worked to implement the guidance on AB 1705 at Chaffey College, where he is a math professor.
“I’m not saying that there aren’t drawbacks to the way that the law is being implemented. But my view, and the view of Chaffey, is, until the law is modified, here we are,” said Yegge. “How are we going to implement this at our own schools to try to give our students the best chance at success?”
Yegge’s approach to the changes on STEM math placement has been to build a cohort model among students so that educators are “not only encouraging, but requiring collaboration and active learning.”
At Chaffey, all math professors assigned to teach calculus-support courses are also required to meet every other Friday for two to three hours to collectively develop content and activities.
Panelist Rena Weiss has also worked to implement support courses at Moorpark College but found that they didn’t quickly fill when they were not mandated for students. In response, her department decided to remove the support courses and opted to focus on tutoring.
This decision seems to be proving successful for their students, said Weiss, but with the strict AB 1705 implementation guidance set by the Chancellor’s Office, there is a chance Moorpark will be unable to continue the current structure if it does not maintain the success rate established within the guidance.
