Are Students Skilled In Mathematics When Enrolling In A Business School?

This paper shows some difficulties that undergraduate students in degrees belonging to the field of Social Sciences and Law must face during their first year at the University because they have not acquired the appropriate level in some basic mathematical skills after graduating from High School. For example, they cannot identify some mathematic symbols that are basic to pass the subject of Mathematics. To do so, a descriptive statistical analysis is performed starting from the results which first-year students have obtained when solving a series of problems given in an initial assessment test at the beginning of the academic year 2016/2017 in order to seek information about the level of basic mathematical skills from High School. The questions in the test, besides being very basic for university students, also analyze some skills which are key to pass the Mathematics courses in the first academic year as, for example, if the students know mathematics symbols or not. One of the main problem could be the last year that students studied the subject of Mathematics in the High School, some of them did it three or four years before the first course at the University. Our main goal is to identify the problems that could do difficult the learning process to the students.