Fall 2010
In Fall 2010 we assessed three courses. The assessment plans/reports for these courses are available here:
All three courses have been assessed directly using the final exam.
Conclusions regarding the major as a whole drawn from the above reports: Viewing the three courses as part of a math major, one may observe the following deep problem. Precalculus is being taught completely by adjuncts who are teaching wildly different interpretations of the department syllabus picking and choosing which departmental projects to assign. The various sections of the course have wildly varying performance on different topics with the biggest variation is student performance on graphing and on trigonometry. The poor precalculus and calculus background of students in Analysis I affects their performance on key major outcomes even as they arrive at Analysis I, while in Discrete Math performance is overwhelmingly better due to the self contained nature of the course.
Suggestions to the Mathematics Department Educational Policy Committee: to ensure strong solid knowledge of all topics in Precalculus and Calculus I we may need our final exams to require passing scores on multiple sections rather than allowing students to slip by with no knowledge of one topic or another. We may need a departmental major exam in a similar format to ensure that all majors, even those who transfer to Lehman, have a solid background in these topics.
Suggestions to the Department: Provide training to adjuncts teaching Precalculus as to the importance of each of the departmental projects in the course. This has already begun. Assign a professor to oversee the many sections of precalculus to ensure that they are staying on schedule. Choose which adjuncts teach which courses based in part on their students' performance on the departmental final exam. For example, an adjunct whose students perform poorly on the trigonometry sections of MAT172 should perhaps be teaching MAT171 which has no trigonometry. Ideally professors could teach MAT172 to ensure a deep understanding of all the subjects and how they are applied in later courses.
Suggestions to the Assessment Office: We need to be able to pay adjuncts for the time they spend on assessment. Relying on volunteers leaves us assessing only those classes taught by adjuncts who are confident about their teaching and willing to have their classes assessed. It is also not cost effective paying a math PhD (professor) to do data entry and spreadsheets when work study students majoring in CIS could be doing this in the assessment office at almost no cost.