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Diane Knich, The Post and Courier, Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Charleston, S.C. - On the academic ride from high school to college, the track doesn't quite line up, causing some students to derail in their early college years, state educators say.

Clint Mullins, a program manager at the South Carolina Commission on Higher Education, said professors who teach freshmen often complain that many of their students just aren't prepared for college-level work. But the majority of high school teachers say they're doing all they can to prepare students for college.

A new statewide project is looking for ways to give students "a seamless transition" from high school to higher education, Mullins said. "We'll be looking at the disconnect between the two systems."

A smooth transition is important, he said, because students who successfully complete two years of college usually graduate on time.

Education leaders from colleges and universities, technical colleges, the state's kindergarten-through-12th-grade system and business leaders gathered for a kickoff meeting in December, Mullins said.

Teams will soon begin to design paired courses that students will take before exiting high school and soon after entering college, he said.

Jeremy Dickens, 19, a Fort Dorchester High School graduate who is in his first year at Trident Technical College, said he would have liked a more coordinated academic approach, especially in math.

Dickens is now taking a specially designed beginning algebra course that meets five days a week. He had originally enrolled in a course that covered the same material, but met just three days each week — a more traditional style for college courses.

He struggled in that course.

"I thought classes would be the same as in high school," he said. But in college, "it's all about the test." In high school, homework accounted for a larger portion of his grade.

His college courses also move much more quickly, and he has to work more independently, he said.
It would have helped if teachers in his last two years of high school had better prepared him for the way classes are taught in college, he said.

Pamela Leonard-Ray, dean of the learning center at Trident, said students in pre-college courses often need assistance with not only the academic material but time management and study skills as well.
Other things also get in their way, such as an over-reliance on a calculator in math classes and difficulty understanding the vocabulary in college textbooks.

Melissa Stowasser,Trident Tech's director of high school programs, said that many college students taking literature courses are unable to analyze what they have read.

That, in turn, affects their writing, Stowasser said. "They don't know what to say," she said.

Stowasser, who is working on the statewide alignment project, said such work "is a long time overdue."

"There's a big gap between what we want and what high schools think we want," she said.

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