Assessment Standards: Recentering and Decentering Higher Education

At this point in time, the end of the first decade of the Twenty-first Century, one would be hard pressed to find a Mathematics professor in the United States not painfully aware that too many students arrive at college holding High School diplomas, but with math skills that are so poor that they need remediation. Remedial math courses, as one would expect, rarely carry credit towards college graduation. This situation has obvious cost-benefit ramifications: a student in remediation, for which he gets no credit, is obviously going to consume proportionally more state money, in the form of financial aid, than he would have if he had not needed this non-credit-bearing help.