About 40 percent of all Ohio students must take remedial courses in college to make up for what they didn’t learn in high school. That’s an enormous burden for students and for the state’s public universities.
But the presidents of Ohio’s public colleges and universities have provided a helpful tool: academic goals which, if reached, guarantee a student won’t be assigned to remediation.
Based on standards adopted recently by the Inter-University Council of Ohio, students who achieve threshold scores on subsections of the ACT and SAT college-admissions tests will be assured they won’t have to take remedial courses. The required ACT scores are 18 in English, 21 in reading and 22 in math; those who take the SAT will have to score 430 in writing, 450 in reading and 520 in math.
Just how those test scores translate to readiness requires quite a bit of explanation — a 45-page document, in fact. Equating those standards to a number on a single test undoubtedly is a simplification, but it’s a reasonable one, making it possible to quickly evaluate the thousands of would-be college freshmen who appear each year.
Setting those numbers and making them public won’t make anybody more ready for college, of course; but they’ll serve as a yardstick. Students who have taken the ACT or SAT and scored below those points will know they have work to do to be ready for college. If they get tutoring or other help or just put in some extra study, they can re-take the college tests with the hope of scoring higher.
In 2010, about 41 percent of the Ohio students who entered college had to take remedial courses. Reducing that number is important, because remediation is a poor use of a university’s resources and costs students time and money, while earning them no credits. More important than the waste, though, is the fact of being unprepared for college.
Typically, students who need remedial courses are less likely to finish college than those who don’t.
Under the state law that called for the college-readiness standards, those who miss the mark won’t necessarily have to take remedial classes; colleges and universities can opt to assess them in different ways and exempt them from remediation. The standards simply are a way for students to earn an automatic exemption.
The readiness of high-school graduates to move on to jobs or further education has become a central focus for Ohio’s education planners.
Separate from the college presidents’ efforts, the state Department of Education and the Board of Regents are charged with developing a new report-card system for evaluating schools, and part of that will be a new graduation test that is supposed to measure whether a student “is ready to enter college or the work force.”
Education officials have tried any number of tests, standards and curriculum revamps in the last decade or two, in the effort to raise student performance and improve the chances that they’ll succeed in life. Focusing on college readiness or career readiness isn’t any more likely than the others to be a panacea. But it’s a common-sense bottom line that merits more attention.