Remedial College Courses, Even for A Students

Joanne Jacobs talks about the phenomenon of A students in high school having to take remedial courses because they are not prepared for college level work.

Christina Jeronomo was an “A” student in high school English classes; she thought she was prepared for college. But she had to take remedial English at Long Beach Community College, delaying her goal of transferring to a four-year college where she can earn a psychology degree. From AP:

. . . a new study calculates, one-third of American college students have to enroll in remedial classes. The bill to colleges and taxpayers for trying to bring them up to speed on material they were supposed to learn in high school comes to between $2.3 billion and $2.9 billion annually.

The students take the hit by having to 1) take course material they should have learned in high school again; and 2) pay for the privilege of doing so.

This is not something that should be allowed to continue. From teh comments on Joanne's post:

You ought to see how unprepared these kids are from an English composition perspective! I feel sorry for them every time I give them a failing grade on their first paper, and their faces fall. Then they come up to me and tell me “I always got As and Bs in high school…” All I can tell them is that we look for different criteria in college papers.

I don’t blame them. I don’t blame their parents. I blame the people who were supposed to give them accurate feedback, and teach them to correct their mistakes. I blame the people who don’t teach them how to use the nuts and bolts of building papers. I blame their elementary school and middle school teachers–by high school and college, it’s almost too late to teach them how to correctly use punctuation and grammar rules.