Many students enter the California Community Colleges unprepared for college-level academic studies and need to complete a basic skills or developmental program in order to succeed in college-level coursework. An EdSource study, Course-taking patterns, policies, and practices in developmental education in the California Community Colleges, found that colleges vary widely in how they organize remedial sequences in writing.

One source of variation was the number of levels of remedial writing coursework offered below college composition. As the table below illustrates, the lowest level of such coursework offered by California community colleges was most commonly (at 45% of colleges) located three levels below college composition. Another 17% of colleges offered shorter writing sequences, while the remainder offered longer sequences.

 

Data: Based on course listings, descriptions, and prerequisites from the 2002-03 through 2008-09 course catalogs of the 107 semester-based community colleges in the study sample.

Notes: Integrated writing/reading courses are considered writing courses for the purposes of this chart. Percentages may not sum to 100 due to rounding.

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