What do college students know? By this professor's calculations, math skills have plummeted.(school life)

Publication: Education Next

Publication Date: 22-SEP-08

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COPYRIGHT 2008 Hoover Institution Press

Professors are constantly asked if their students are better or worse today than in the past. I conducted an experiment to try to answer that question for one group of students.

For my fall 2006 course, Calculus I for the Biological and Social Sciences at Johns Hopkins University (JHU), I administered the same final exam I had used for the course in the fall of 1989. The SAT mathematics (SATM) scores of the two classes were nearly identical, and the classes contained approximately the same percentage of the Arts and Sciences freshman class.

The content of the calculus I course...

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