CSU ends remedial courses that delay progress

It has been more than two decades since the Cal State University system first made headlines for attempting to eliminate remedial classes. The trustees’ 1995 plan to phase out the courses sounded bold at the time, but as their 2007 deadline came and went, it proved quixotic.

Now CSU is back in the news, making good on the trustees’ 22-year-old pledge with Chancellor Timothy P. White’s August executive order to end stand-alone remedial classes. But this time, the motivation is different: a concern that its policies were inadvertently setting up students to fail.

Data show that underrepresented minority students bear the brunt of existing policies, including placement tests with limited predictive value.

But unless the new rules are transparent and evidence-based, inequities may persist.

The new strategy involves upending the 23-campus system’s approach to assessing students’ proficiency in the first place. At its heart is the elimination of the math and English placement exams that determined whether students were college ready.

Instead of those placement exams, CSU will use students’ high school performance, including test results, to ascertain who needs to brush up in math or English. In place of remedial courses that delay progress toward a degree, those students will receive extra support in conjunction with credit-bearing math and English classes.

In making these changes, CSU signals a commitment to remove barriers to student success and equity. Past policies have sent black and Latino students to remedial classes at double and triple the rates of white and Asian students.

While remedial courses are intended to help students succeed, recent research shows that they can deter students from pursuing a degree, and many students could succeed without them.

Beginning in 1995, CSU began forcing out students who were not proficient in math or English by the end of their freshman year. It subsequently implemented programs to help students become college ready during high school and the summer before college. While those measures reduced the need for remedial courses, more than a third of entering freshmen still require them.

Last fall, this group included only 18 percent of white freshmen compared to 59 percent of black students and 47 percent of Latino students. Of the 25,010 students deemed not proficient in 2015-16, about 3,300 were disenrolled for not completing remedial requirements. More than two-thirds of those students were black or Latino.

How CSU implements and monitors its new policies will determine whether more students earn degrees.

Research has revealed the inefficacy of placement exams. It makes sense, therefore, to de-emphasize tests, as CSU apparently means to do. CSU is joining a growing number of colleges in heeding evidence that high school coursework and grades can better predict students’ success in college courses than test scores.

However, unless the system is careful in designing its new measures of proficiency, it risks reproducing the old results. As it eliminates its math and English placement tests, CSU is keeping the SAT, ACT and other tests in the mix for determining students’ readiness for college-level work. Absent a significant role for high school grades in the formula, the results will mirror the old ones.

In fact, there is evidence that demographic factors known at birth are increasingly influential in accounting for test score differences. Two years ago, a study by retired UC researcher Saul Geiser found that race is a stronger factor than even family income or parental education in explaining score differences on the SAT.

Whatever new placement measures are adopted need to be properly vetted on a regular basis. Had CSU done this previously, it might have changed its placement policies sooner. A 2010 study commissioned by the system found that many students who did not pass its math placement test nevertheless were able to succeed in a college-level math course. The system took no apparent action on that finding. When the study came to light in 2015, the system disavowed the findings but, no additional studies were conducted and no change in test policy occurred — until this month.

Eliminating stand-alone remedial courses lowers the stakes for being deemed “not proficient,” but it doesn’t remove the need for fair and accurate methods of deciding who needs additional support.

The new curricular approaches the system is adopting to provide students that support will also need to be closely evaluated. Strategies such as co-requisite courses — college-level courses that embed just-in-time remediation for students — have been researched in community colleges. CSU will need to gather data and study the methods its campuses adopt to ensure that they are enhancing student learning.

As the largest university system anywhere, CSU owes nothing less to its students, to the state and to the other universities that will learn from its example.