The chairwoman of the National Committee for Mathematical Sciences, Nalini Joshi, said students were having great difficulty completing first-year university subjects because they had been given ''very dangerous advice'' at school to chose subjects they thought would boost their Australian Tertiary Admissions Rank.

''I think it's getting more and more difficult for our lecturers,'' the University of Sydney professor said. ''We do teach a first-year course which attempts to provide calculus to students who have never encountered it. But I would say that, although we do it as a service, it really is very difficult for the students, even at the end of the course, because we are trying to make up for two years of education in what is a 12- to 13-week course.''

She said there should be prerequisites for some courses and it was ''unrealistic'' to expect a student to cope in an engineering course with no background in sophisticated mathematics.

Stephen Bush, a lecturer in the School of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Technology, Sydney, said it would be ''really nice'' to make maths a compulsory component of entry.

''But, in the current competitive environment that universities find themselves in, it's quite difficult to do in practice,'' Dr Bush said.