A Redesign of Precalculus at California State University, Monterey Bay

With the goal of improving student success, the chancellor of the California State University (CSU) system issued an executive order that required all CSU campuses to eliminate remedial math courses as of Fall 2018 and place all first-year students into appropriate General Education (GE) mathematics/quantitative reasoning courses. The Mathematics and Statistics Department at California State University, Monterey Bay (CSUMB) saw this as an opportunity to redesign and improve our General Education courses, including Precalculus. Our redesigned General Education courses are fully coordinated, incorporate reading, and active learning, and all have an associated co-requisite course for students who need additional support. In this article, we share the changes we made to Precalculus, the process our department undertook to make these changes happen, and some of the successes and challenges we encountered during the first semester of implementation.