Good comments
The folks at Mathematically Correct left a few good comments on previous posts of mine, and I thought the comments deserved greater attention. So here they are:
For a discussion of issues related to fuzzy math, go to http://www.aei.org/past_event/conf020304.htm. This contains video and transcripts of an American Enterprise Institute forum on math education.
The conference summary alone contains more common-sense knowledge than an entire year's worth of fuzzy math instruction. What's more, one of the presenters at this conference is David Klein, the math professor who tipped me off to CSU Northridge's new remedial math policy.
Setting cut points or content levels on exams for broad ranges of students is difficult, but there are negative consequences of setting too low as well as of setting too high... The link below discusses the negative consequences of setting the bar too low in terms of raising student achievement beyond merely fair to middling: http://mathematicallycorrect.com/lonestar.htm. This document includes a review of test items across all tested grades and multiple years, as well as a statistical analysis of student performance.
David Klein appears here, once again. I'm putting the links up now; I'll have comments on this second one later today.