How Out Of Sync Are College Prep Standards?

As a private school offering a college preparatory high school program to its students, the majority of which have college firmly envisioned in their future plans, our curriculum is as dynamic as the Earth’s ever changing climate. But much like the varied perceptions and on-going debates among scientists and others over what exactly are the causes and dangers of our planet’s climactic changes, similar debates among educators argue over the educational background a college bound student should have before exiting high school.

In April 2007, a study released by Iowa-based ACT Inc. highlighted the enormity of the gap between what high schools as a whole are teaching in their college-preparatory courses and what colleges really want their incoming students to know.

The study by the Iowa City producer of the ACT college-admissions tests is based on a national curriculum survey of more than 6,500 middle school, high school, and post-secondary English, reading, math, and science teachers. The testing company conducts such a survey every three to five years to help shape the content of its assessments.

The new survey found that college professors generally want incoming students to have a deeper understanding of a selected number of topics and skills…while high school teachers in all content areas tend to rate a far broader array of content and skills as important or very important.

According to the report from the ACT’s education division, the blame for this gap is largely due to the state academic-content standards that high school teachers must follow. “State learning standards are often too wide and not deep enough. They are trying to cover too much ground—more ground than colleges deem necessary—in the limited time they have with students.”

Earlier studies by the ACT have also focused on gaps in students’ college readiness by examining how high school students' course taking relates to their scores on admissions exams and their grades in college.

The new study strikes a similar theme, but looks more closely at the actual content knowledge and skills that high school teachers say they are teaching within their courses, and how important they rate that content compared with ratings by postsecondary instructors.

More than half the states are now working to better align high school standards, tests, and curricula with college expectations. An equally large number have created “P-16” (Pre-school through college) councils to help coordinate goals and activities across the various levels of education, from preschool through college or graduate school.

In general, the ACT survey found, college professors take a dim view of their states’ academic-content standards for high schools.

Nearly two-thirds of those respondents (65 percent) said their state standards prepare students poorly or very poorly for college-level work in their respective subject areas. In contrast, a majority of high school teachers said their state standards are preparing students well or very well for college-level work.

The study also highlights significant differences between high school instruction and college expectations in specific curriculum areas. For example:

• In writing, college professors tended to value the basic mechanics of writing (such as sentence structure and punctuation) more highly than high school teachers did. High school English teachers rated topic and idea development as the most important set of skills.


• In mathematics, professors rated being able to understand and rigorously apply fundamental skills and processes as more important than exposure to more advanced math topics. High school math teachers tended to view the latter as important. Professors also placed far more emphasis on reading comprehension (being able to understand new material by reading a textbook).


• In reading, the survey found a general lack of reading courses in high school and a decline in the teaching of targeted reading strategies after the 9th grade. In contrast, college professors of remedial courses rated such strategies as very important and reported devoting a large percentage of time to teaching them.


• In science, high school teachers consistently rated content as more important to student success than science process or inquiry skills--which is in direct contrast to both middle school and post-secondary science teachers.

What the survey suggests is that our content for “college preparatory” standards should focus on the most essential knowledge and skills needed for college readiness rather than covering the gamut of topics so readily available or popular, and to focus our content standards on a smaller subset of big or powerful ideas that could guide students’ development within a content area.

And so the debate goes...