This study reports findings regarding the application of a survey of achievement goal orientations to a sample of mathematics 777 students enrolled in remedial and college mathematics courses at a community college. The survey was based on the Patterns of Adaptive Learning Scales [PALS] and it included questions from the Views About Mathematics Survey [VAMS]. Interviews with faculty teaching these students gave us their perceptions of how their students would score in the scales measured with the survey. Survey results indicate that students' achievement goal orientations are consistent with adaptive learning patterns: students are interested in developing competence, expect and believe they can handle challenging work, avoid self-handicapping behaviors, and exhibit a positive mathematics self-concept. Interviews reveal that instructors perceive that their students are more concerned with external judgments regarding their ability and less interested in developing competence, that they engage in self-handicapping behaviors, have a poor sense of their own capacity to do the work, routinely press for reducing challenge in the classroom, and have a low mathematics self-concept. In addition, students in remedial classes and their instructors hold more positive perceptions than students and instructors of college classes. These discrepancies suggest that instructors might benefit from learning the goal orientations that community college mathematics students have, so they can take advantage of the high confidence and motivation to learn that their students bring to the mathematics classroom. Appended are: Survey Items and Scales. (Contains 11 tables, 1 figure, and 5 footnotes.)