Introduction

Mount Mary College (MMC), located in metropolitan Milwaukee, is Wisconsin's oldest Catholic college for women, enrolling 600 full-time undergraduate, 600 part-time undergraduate and 175 graduate students.

Historically, the college has not had a mathematics course requirement for the baccalaureate degree. In the past two years, a liberal arts core task force had been working to design a core to meet the needs of women in the 21st century based on the mission and vision of the college.

This paper will describe the steps taken by both the Department of Mathematics/Computer Science and the college as a whole in introducing a Quantitative Reasoning (QR) program at MMC that will meet the challenges facing women graduating from MMC.

Program History

In summer 2002, the Department of Mathematics/ Computer Science received support from the college to examine the effectiveness of all remedial math courses as part of the department's involvement with the MAA PREP Workshop: Assessment at the Departmental Level. The initial goals of this examination were to determine the effectiveness of the two lower-level remedial math courses and advise the college on how to better serve students in fulfilling the college's current math competency requirement. Examination of the enrollment records from the last five years revealed that more than 60% of students admitted to MMC are in need of remedial courses in the mathematics department. We also found that only about 25% of students enrolled in the remedial courses continued with the algebra sequence, and less than 2% of students who continued with the algebra sequence enrolled in precalculus.