UW offers refresher math course for incoming students
Posted Sep 19, 2020 03:30:00 PM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
The University of Waterloo is making sure its math students are prepared for the upcoming year.
An online course, offered to incoming students at the school's Faculty of Mathematics, is helping new students sharpen their skills.
This comes as many of those incoming students had their education abruptly interrupted by COVID-19 in March.
The University of Waterloo launched their online refresher course, MTHEL 199, in August with students having the option to take the course during that month or when school started in September.
But it seems, not many wanted to wait with 2,600 of the 2,800 incoming students starting the course last month.
“We really wanted to make sure students coming into [their] first year had all the tools needed for success in terms of their preparation,” says Ian VanderBurgh, Director of the Centre for Education in Mathematics and Computing (CEMC). “No matter how incoming students' school year ended, we wanted to try and make sure their mathematical skills are at the right place.”
To pass, students need to score at least 75 per cent on six branches of mathematics and achieve an overall average of 85 per cent.
Those six branches include inequalities and absolute values, radicals and rational expressions, trigonometry, exponential and logarithmic functions, polynomials and introductory calculus.
Ten secondary school teachers were also recruited to handle the course discussion board with over 215 questions posted within the first three weeks of the course being launched.
