Catching the Greased Pig

Last week I wrote about the frustrating dilemma of how to respond when a student fails a corequisite developmental course but passes the simultaneous credit-bearing course. In a purely academic sense, it seems like a no-brainer to waive the developmental coreq, but that raises tricky financial aid issues. But making it optional runs into Kay McClenney’s accurate observation that students don’t do optional. Every time we think we’ve found a solution, it slips away, like the proverbial greased pig.

Happily, I have the best readers ever, so I put out a call for solutions. Folks stepped up. Not every answer would work in my context, but contexts differ, so here goes.

A few readers suggested a lecture/lab model, as in introductory science classes:

“Make it one course, like in sciences where you have a lecture and a lab. You gotta do both for one grade.”

That would work for capturing the students who need the developmental one, but it would add time and cost for students who don’t. Admittedly, this model was the way that DeVry taught composition in the late ’90s; I remember teaching “writing lab” in a room full of oscilloscopes. In states with hard caps on credits for associate degrees—New Jersey, I’m looking at you—the added credits would wreak havoc on curricula.

A reader from the Virginia Community College system offered this:

“The VCCS mandates that students who passed the credit math class must receive a passing grade in the support class. There is no discretion on the part of the instructor. If students simply attend enough support classes to avoid administrative withdrawal, then the students will pass those classes if they pass the credit classes. The main idea is that the goal of the support class is to help the student pass the credit class, so the goal of the class was accomplished, even in the scenario described here.”

I’ll admit liking this one. It puts the instructor of the developmental class in an awkward spot, but if they know that going in, and it’s a matter of policy, it could work. It also leaves the students who placed out of the developmental class unburdened, which is a plus. The fact that this apparently works at the level of a statewide system within shouting distance of D.C. offers some assurance that the financial aid issues aren’t prohibitive.

A reader from a math department offered a parallel observation:

“Our solution has been to write into our system the required course (ex: Calculus) as officially required for the degree, and the other prerequisite courses as what we colloquially call our ‘hidden prereqs’—required in the sense that students who place into them must take them first, but not actually showing up on the requirements for awarding the major or degree itself. Our registrar has been able to scribe this into our DegreeWorks system such that the prereqs (being required and not optional in order to move on to the degree course) are financial aid–eligible, but since the departments did not actually change their curriculum, a student who passes the degree course and not the prereq or coreq is still absolutely fine to continue onward without going backwards.”

This makes sense institutionally, but it feels a bit dishonest to the students. Hidden prereqs are a real thing, but the term is usually used pejoratively; they make degree completion look faster and cheaper than it actually is. On the bright side, keeping those courses out of the degree path does answer the question of what to do if a student fails the lower-level course. Still, this feels a bit slippery to me.

Another reader offered a pass-fail option as a workaround:

“In response to your column today, the solution I’d propose (and which I am currently proposing here at my own institution), would be to grant a P grade for the developmental course for anyone who passed (C or better) the co-req’d freshman composition course. Keep them co-req’d, and mandatory. But if the point of the developmental course is to render the student eligible for the credit-bearing course, then a student who passes the credit-bearing course as part of an accelerated co-requisite scenario has de facto demonstrated that they are eligible for it. Sort of like a retroactive credit-for-prior-learning type of deal, is how I think of it.”

Pass-fail makes a lot of sense to me in the context of a developmental course. And framing this as retroactive credit-for-prior-learning has a certain logic to it. It comes close to the Virginia system solution, which inspires confidence.

We’ve occasionally discussed mandatory tutoring as an alternative. One reader offered:

“Instead of doing a coreq which recent research found has no impact vs no coreq at all we mandate at least one tutor visit for most students in math and English. Research we did found if they go once they’ll go again to tutoring. Did not run as RCT but difference in differences so have somewhat causal evidence. (We also run lots of RCT here.)”

The end of that quote is a bit of statistical inside baseball, but I’m intrigued by the idea that once students go to tutoring, they’ll go back voluntarily. Local experience has largely suggested otherwise. I’m curious whether there’s research more broadly on whether going to tutoring works like the first potato chip—you can’t have just one—or if more students see it as something closer to going to the dentist. The concept of required tutoring makes a great deal of sense to me, but if students skip it, we’re right back where we started.

As long as we have open admissions, we’re going to have challenges like these. Students show up with different academic backgrounds, and sometimes they follow pathways of their own devising. It’s worth remembering that that’s good. Our challenge is to meet the needs of a wide range of students within the confines of minimal resources and a financial aid system based on full-time, residential students. It’s not a clean fit.

But thank you to all of the wise and worldly readers who wrote in! You’ve made suggestions that we haven’t considered locally and confirmed my sense both that a lot of people care, and that there are more possibilities in this world than are considered in my philosophy. Thank you!

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