Just one in five students who take calculus in high school will enroll directly in Calc II, research shows.
Starting this fall, the University of Pennsylvania will require students to satisfy prerequisite requirements for six advanced calculus and algebra courses. The change comes as college officials across the country are working to address incoming students’ declining math skills.
Penn’s math prerequisites aren’t new; they have always been listed alongside course descriptions in the catalog, but now the university will verify them instead of relying on students to decide whether or not they meet the requirements, according to Molly McGlone, deputy dean of undergraduate studies in the College of Arts & Sciences.
“Faculty in Math and other disciplines have carefully designed the courses in a sequential manner to support student learning. Students who are in courses that they are not adequately prepared for can often run into challenges,” McGlone told Inside Higher Ed in an email.
Students can satisfy the prerequisite requirements by taking a corresponding Penn math course, receiving a relevant Advanced Placement credit or passing a credit exam. Credit exams are held during new student orientation and once again when the semester starts, according to The Daily Pennsylvanian, which first reported the news. Students who enroll in one of the six targeted courses but don’t meet the prerequisite requirements may see a registration issue flag on their schedule.
Math prerequisites are common, but the types of prerequisites colleges employ and how strictly they enforce them has changed over the years, said Pamela Burdman, founder and executive director of Just Equations, a California-based math education–equity nonprofit.
“Many college systems have moved away from remedial prerequisites that require students to repeat high school content in favor of corequisite strategies in which students take a college-level course with extra support,” she told Inside Higher Ed in an email. “Research has shown that many students were being placed into courses lower than the courses where they have the capacity to succeed.”
Penn’s change is how colleges typically approach a standard undergraduate math sequence—several calculus courses, linear algebra and differential equations, Burdman said. Just one in five students who take calculus in high school will enroll directly in Calc II, according to research by David Bressoud, professor emeritus at Macalester College and former president of the Mathematical Association of America. Meanwhile, most students who take high school calculus will repeat it in college, take a lower-level math course or a math course that doesn’t require calculus at all, such as business math, Burdman said.
“In general, more selective colleges would like STEM majors to have taken calculus if it’s available to them, or at least be ready to take calculus when they start college,” she said. “At the same time, there is growing awareness that access to calculus can depend on what high school a student attends, and Black and Latinx students generally have less access to calculus courses. So increasingly colleges are making available at least precalculus courses as an on-ramp to calculus.”
Math achievement has been declining nationally, Burdman noted. A report from the University of California, San Diego, made national and international headlines in November when it stated that the number of first-year students whose math skills fell below a middle school level had increased nearly 30-fold over the past five years. Since then, hundreds of University of California system math professors have called on the system to bring back standardized testing requirements for admission.
“While pandemic-era disruptions accelerated this trend, it began before COVID,” Burdman said of the decline in math skills. “Experts believe other long-term trends are at play—such as absenteeism, effects of social media and students’ use of AI.”
