Article by Andrew Trounson, The Australian.
THE University of Technology, Sydney is set to become the first Australian university to introduce a compulsory maths subject for first-year undergraduates as it responds to growing concerns at poor levels of numeracy.
The move has sparked a call for all universities to make understanding mathematical concepts a key graduate attribute and either introduce compulsory courses or embed it in other subjects.
UTS plans from 2016 to make all incoming undergraduates take its new “Arguments, Evidence and Intuition” course that focuses on teaching students not so much to crunch numbers as to understand concepts such as statistics, probability and the difference between correlations and causality. The subject is being launched as an elective in 2015.
Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute director Geoff Prince said UTS should be applauded and other universities should follow suit in ensuring graduates were comfortable with maths. “It isn’t a remedial change, it is a progressive one. We should have been doing this a long time ago,” he said.