Above photo: Since the implementation of the “Jam, Quest, Re-quest” system, students like Kari Pickett have seen huge boosts to their grades in mathematics. Ryan McGahan | The Crow’s Nest
By Ryan McGahan
Intimidating by name alone, Precalculus Algebra and Trigonometry (MAC 1147) is historically one of the most unpassable courses on campus.
Data from the Office of Institutional Research shows that across the fall semesters from 2014 to 2016, in over two thirds of classes, at least 40 percent of students received a D, an F or withdrew from the course entirely.
While some courses’ failure rates vary with the professor teaching it or the class schedule, the numbers for MAC 1147 have been mostly consistent, regardless of teacher or time.
This has proven a hurdle for some students, especially since the course is a prerequisite for Calculus I, required for majors such as Biology and Environmental Science.
“It’s almost as if we had been filtered through,” Lilibel Cano, a biomedical science major who passed the course in 2016 before graduating in fall 2017, said. “Only the super serious ones made it through.”
It’s a problem that the university is aware of and has been working to fix since spring semester, with the implementation of new policies in the classroom, such as the Jam, Quest, Re-Quest system.
The system takes the four large exams that divide up the semester and breaks them into six smaller quests — bigger than a quiz, smaller than a test — so students don’t feel overwhelmed.
Right before each quest, students are allowed a jam session, where they can ask their professor to work through any problems from previous assignments they struggled with as one last review right before their test.
If a student does not like their grade on a quest, they have two weeks until the next one to take it again as a re-quest. Even if they do worse, only the better of the two grades will be kept with no penalty.
“If students take the quest, and it didn’t go well, then they can say ‘OK, let’s just pretend that was a pretest that didn’t count toward my grade, and then I can take the re-quest,” Sean Murphy, who taught the course in fall 2017 and has used the system in other classes, said.
The system has been tested in classes such as College Algebra and Introduction to Statistics. The improvements have been huge, according to Kathleen Gibson, quality enhancement plan director and creator of the Jam, Quest, Re-Quest system.
“What we found was the success rates in College Algebra nationally average around 50 percent, which is not good, but here they were significantly lower, around 20 percent,” Gibson said. “Our success rates now are between 65 and 70 percent a semester.”
Since last spring was the first semester the system has been in place for MAC1147, the school is still uncertain of exactly how much it has helped. However, students like Kari Pickett, who took the course before and after the new changes, say it’s been a big improvement.
“We didn’t have that extra review session, that really helps,” Pickett said. “Knowing that you have that opportunity of a re-quest is nice, it’s nice to know that you have a safety net if it’s necessary.”
Even if a student doesn’t take the re-quest, knowing that it exists has helped ease the tension that comes with testing in math courses, one of the major goals of the new program.
“We did a test at the beginning of the semester and again at the end that measured negative feelings associated with math, which would indicate math anxiety, and not surprisingly math anxiety went down,” Gibson explained. “We also measured positive feelings associated with math self-efficacy, so ‘I can do it’— those went up.”
Teachers and students both agreed that a student’s attitude plays a huge role in how successful they are going to be in the course.
Edwin Abaquita, who is teaching MAC 1147 this semester, echoes this sentiment on the first day of class.
“If you hate something, every time you attend a class, it’s holding you down, it’s not helping you,” Abaquita said. “I say to them every time, at the end of the semester, your grade will hate you back.”
