'Adding It Up' Part 4: I'm Not Ready for College Algebra. Are You?

Students who don't pass the COMPASS test when they enroll in CUNY's community colleges are assigned to remedial math. They can avoid the assessment if they scored at least a 75 on their Math Regents or above 480 on the math SAT. Students take COMPASS again when they finish their remedial class.

Had I enrolled at LaGuardia today, I would have been exempt from taking COMPASS based on my high school math scores. But since I planned to visit Professor Jorge Perez's class at least six or eight times, I wanted to know what the experience was like for his students. I asked to take the COMPASS test but was told that I couldn't without being a registered student. So ACT, which designs the test, suggested I go to their website and take a sample test.

I hadn't taken math since high school, back when the Flock of Seagulls and Duran Duran ruled MTV (and that was when it played actual music videos). I was a good math student. In fact, I scored ridiculously high on the SAT thanks to lots of test prep. But I had already forgotten all of my math by the time I started college the fall after graduating high school. When I took the University of Michigan's placement test, required for all freshmen, they told me I wasn't ready for regular college math. So I told the academic counselor to look at my SAT scores. That got me sent to Calculus for the Social Sciences. I barely passed the course.

Given how poorly I did less than a year after high school, I had extremely low expectations for the COMPASS test. I printed out the sample test from ACT's website and sat down in a recording studio. You can hear my frustration here.

My sample test -- showing work.

An hour later, I determined that I had scored a 64%. I wrote to ACT asking if that was good enough to get out of remedial math. Ed Colby, of the company's media relations department, warned me that there was no way to really answer that question. For one thing, it wasn't a real COMPASS test. There was also no way to know how much it resembled the one used at CUNY. It just contained similar types of questions. Here's his full disclaimer.

Please Note: The sample items that ACT has provided on the ACT COMPASS
web pages are not designed to represent a complete test, and a counting
of the number right/number wrong (or calculation of the % right on a
group such as Prealgebra) is not appropriate for use as an estimate of
the student's likely score on the COMPASS tests.

The COMPASS Sample Items are provided to illustrate the types of items
the student will encounter in the COMPASS mathematics test, providing a
practice experience for students with a few questions from several
different areas. It is not possible or appropriate to provide an
estimate of the student's real score from these sample items.

But he was a good sport and ran my results past the folks at ACT.

So did I pass? The folks at ACT wrote 'this individual would probably need to start in an intermediate algebra course -- which is the highest remedial course at many colleges -- or take an intermediate algebra 'brush up' experience to rebuild the math skills in intermediate algebra.'

In other words, I would not be ready for a credit-bearing college algebra course based solely on these scores.

See how you would do. And let me know.

There were 30 questions in total. I only took the Numerical Skills/Prealgebra Items and Sample Algebra Items. I couldn't remember enough geometry and trigonometry to tackle those sections, too.