EVALUATION OF MATHEMATICAL SKILLS OF NEWLY ADMITTED STUDENTS OF BACHELOR STUDY

In Slovakia, basic mathematics course is taught in most economics and technology faculties in the first years of the bachelor study. The aim of this course is to provide the students with all the mathematical knowledge they need in their next study. Unfortunately, there are big differences in the mathematical knowledge of newly admitted students. They graduated from different types of high schools with a diverse range of number of math lectures in their last years of study. This is why it is really demanding to prepare the content of this course. On the one hand it is necessary to cover all areas of mathematics that are required in their study, on the other hand it is appropriate to start the course with a survey of mathematical knowledge which students should acquire already at secondary school. Therefore, it is important to know what the students’ knowledge and skills really are and to identify the areas of mathematics that students are unfamiliar with. Consequently the mathematics course should be adjusted to meet the newly specified requirements.

We created a mathematics test for newly admitted students in Faculty of Operations and Economics of Transport and Communications (FPEDAS). The test consists of two parts. In the first part we selected 10 tasks from the international PISA 2012 testing. In the second part we focused on the basic calculus (such are fractions, linear and quadratic equations). We evaluated the dependency between the number of math lectures that students attended in the last year of their study at secondary school and their mathematical performance.