Allied Parents and Students Against Maths Pathway (APSAMP) is a grassroots organisation made up of parents and students from BDC who are opposed to the school's use of the Maths Pathway learning platform. Maths Pathway has been shown to be ineffective in preparing students for HSC-level mathematics, and APSAMP believes that it is hindering the learning of BDC students.

APSAMP has been working to raise awareness about the problems with Maths Pathway and to lobby the school administration to switch to a different platform. They have organised several protests and have gathered signatures on a petition. We remain committed to fighting for the learning of students at BDC.

Aim of APSAMP

APSAMP’s fundamental objective is to ameliorate student learning at Bishop Druitt College within the field of mathematics. We aspire to achieve this through campaigning for, reviewing, and encouraging alternatives to, the Maths Pathway program.

What is Maths Pathway?

Maths Pathway is a learning program designed to revolutionise the way students learn in the mathematics classroom. The Maths Pathway program works by analysing a student's current mathematics knowledge, and providing catered mathematics lessons based upon their skill level. These catered lessons are titled ‘modules’. In theory, these modules provide a self-paced, tailored approach to teaching mathematics. However, in practice, these modules are far from their proposed function. These so called “modules” are in reality just poorly made, online worksheets.

Our Proposal

APSAMP proposes that the administration of Bishop Druitt College conduct a ​​thorough re-evaluation of the continued usage of the Maths Pathway software within the mathematics classrooms at BDC. Maths Pathway is without a doubt an extremely powerful and advanced tool for the learning and teaching of mathematics. It allows students to work in a self-paced and self-oriented manner, and allows teachers and parents to observe complex statistics on student progress. There are however some major problems with this software.

• Students often indicate that the Maths Pathway website is cumbersome to use and makes it difficult and time consuming to complete their work.
• Studies conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia and abroad have demonstrated that the vast majority of students that participate in these online mathematics programs end up having lower results than students who were taught using more traditional methods.
  
  
• Many teachers have found that Maths Pathway explains relatively simple concepts in convoluted, confusing ways; not only this but the program only ever shows one way to do each problem when in reality there are many ways to complete each problem.
  
  
• When using the Maths Pathway system, students work individually in silence. This is a far cry from the modern workplace where collaboration is a crucial key to success. 
  
  
• The answers were always given on each “module” so students are tempted simply to look at these and not learn the actual content.