As a slew of freshmen are completing their first year of college, many are realizing that the high school diploma handed to them wasn't enough to prepare them for what lay ahead.

According to the US Department of Education, one-third of undergraduates must take remedial coursework because they did not graduate high school with the skills to perform well at the college level.

In fall 2005, 3,081 first time freshmen were admitted to SF State, 43.5 percent required remediation in math and 45.9 percent in English. The average grade point average for students needing remediation was over 3.10

Kevin Conway has been an English lecturer at SF State since 1987. He teaches English 114, a first year writing composition course, and worked at Balboa High School for three years in a program that linked high school and college English.

“There are lots of students who come out of high school who haven’t learned how to write anything but literary based compositions,” Conway said.

Students have a difficult time when asked to write analytically, as is required in essay writing, he said.

One cause for the ill preparedness might be the increase in class sizes and the heavy course load that teachers expect, Conway said.

Freshman Ivie Omoruyi, 17, said that the two-paged essays she wrote in high school did not prepare her for the five-paged essays she writes now.

“In high school I was getting A’s in English, now I’m struggling through English 114,” said Omoruyi, who was enrolled in a remedial English course last semester.

Omoruyi said practice in note taking and more attention focused on tests and instead of homework in high school would have prepared her for college; where tests often account for a majority of a student's grade.

For 17 year olds in the U.S., reading and math scores have remained flat since the early 1970s, according to the US Department of Education. American students rank 27th in the world in mathematics problem solving, according to the Program for International Student Assessment.

Kerin Keys teaches Algebra II, equivalent to second year high school mathematics.

“The majority of students do very well, it’s a refresher course for a lot of people but there definitely are some students that struggle,” said Keys, who also pointed to large class sizes as part of the problems students face in high school.

Through finding out what students know and do not know, and implementing smaller class sizes, teachers would be able to meet students at their level and bring them up to speed, said Keys, who taught math to high school students for a year.

“A lot of students who struggle don’t have strong math backgrounds from grade school, especially in basics like working with fractions and solving equations,” Keyes said.

Biology major Crystal Eboigeodin, 18, got up to pre-calculus in high school but was placed in algebra I after taking the math placement test for college. She is now in Algebra II.

“When you get here and you take algebra in the remedial courses it’s completely different from the way they taught in high school," Eboigeodin said. "They mainly focus on basic algebra, so they should have taught us to do different methods of math."

Although America is one of the richest countries in the world, a 2002 study by UNICEF ranked the country 18th in education out of 24 other wealthy countries.

In response to the poor results from America's elementary schools and high schools, President Bush announced a $5.9 billion American Competitive Initiative earlier this year. Some of the goals for the initiative included 300 grants for schools to implement research-based math curricula, a goal of 700,000 low-income students to pass advanced placement tests, and have 100,000 highly qualified math and science teachers by 2015.