Results of a survey of first-year linguistics students on mathematics

This study is motivated by a practical problem of interest to instructors of service mathematics courses – how non-STEM students perceive mathematics at the initial stage of their studies. There were two cohorts – first-year students enrolled in 2024 and first-year students enrolled in 2025. The first sheet contains the responses to a questionnaire comprising 22 questions. The survey included socio-demographic questions, open-ended questions about professional identity and the role of mathematics in linguistics, self-assessment of competence in seven mathematical domains, as well as closed and open questions aimed at operationalising the components of mathematical awareness.The choice of mathematical domains (set theory, graph theory, mathematical logic, combinatorics, probability theory, mathematical statistics, linear algebra) was driven by their direct relevance to contemporary areas of linguistics – from formal syntax and semantics to corpus research and neural network models of natural language processing.<strong>Added paragraph:</strong>The second sheet contains the results of student testing on the same mathematical topics as in the self-assessment. The testing was conducted within an online course. For each mathematical domain, there were 2 to 4 tests, each containing 18–20 tasks, mostly with answer entry (free‑response). The responses have been anonymised – only the first name or a pseudonym chosen by the student is retained. In addition, the countries of origin of international students have been replaced with "non‑RF".