The stated mission of the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA) is to promote public confidence that quality of provision and standards of awards in higher education are being safeguarded and enhanced. In addition to auditing institutional arrangements for managing quality and standards it assesses the quality and standards of teaching and learning at the subject level in each university. A subject review report is published for each institution following each assessment visit. On completion of each subject assessment cycle i.e. when all universities offering that subject have been reviewed the QAA publishes subject overview reports. One advantage of an overview report is that it is one step removed from particular institutions. It represents a distillation of the findings of many reviewers visiting scores of universities. It can thus provide a snapshot of the state of health of teaching and learning throughout England and Northern Ireland in that subject. But a subject overview report looks at a specific discipline or occasionally a group of cognate disciplines. It is useful to take one further step back and look at the overall picture provided by reports in several disciplines. Such an investigation reveals an interesting and commonly occurring theme: the ill-preparedness of incoming students forthe mathematical demands of university science and engineering degree schemes and its consequences
