The head of the board that governs Iowa, Iowa State and U-N-I says new admissions standards for the schools should be welcomed by parents. Earlier this month, the Board of Regents approved a new formula for determining who gets in to the universities.
The rules, which go into effect in two years, compile a score for students based on their ranking in their graduating class, the number of advanced English, math, science and foreign language courses they take in high school, and their A-C-T score. Regents president Michael Gartner hopes the outcome will be fewer remedial classes at the college level.
“I think what’s going to happen is there’s going to be happy parents because all of a sudden there’s going pressures in the high schools on children to take more of what we call the core courses,” Gartner says. “There’s going to be pressures on these (high) schools to offer more of the core courses.”
According to Gartner, the universities have had to offer a lot of remedial math and science courses for in-coming freshman who are not been “up to speed” because they did not take advanced classes in high school, or their school didn’t offer those classes. Gartner made his comments during taping of an Iowa Public Television program.