A calculus professor at UC Berkeley is sounding the alarm about the inability of many of her students to even do middle school-level math.
Some of this can be attributed to learning losses during the pandemic, but not all of it. This is a serious problem.
The professor, Zvezdelina Stankova, wrote this for the San Francisco Standard:
I teach calculus at Berkeley. Some of my students can’t do middle school math
In March, two California families opened college admissions decisions that should make anyone who cares about higher education stop and think.
One student — I’ll call him Elias — was admitted to a top University of California engineering program. His family was thrilled though surprised. Math had been his weakest subject in high school, but they assumed the university had seen something they hadn’t.
Another student — Nadia — watched rejection after rejection arrive from UC campuses. One turned her down even though she had earned A’s there in Calculus II and other college-level STEM courses through concurrent enrollment.
These are real students. I’ve changed their names, and withheld their schools, to protect their privacy.
Seen side by side, their outcomes don’t make sense. They make perfect sense only if you imagine admissions working less like careful evaluation and more like chance.
I don’t use that comparison lightly.
I teach mathematics at UC Berkeley. Three days a week, I stand in front of lecture halls with 500 to 1,400 students. By the second week of the semester, I already know who is in trouble. Some students are five to eight years behind in mathematics. Office hours that should be spent discussing integrals instead become lessons on fractions and basic algebra you would expect students to learn in middle school.
That is why this spring and summer, thousands of faculty members across all 10 UC campuses — including more than two-thirds of UC’s mathematics faculty — signed open letters(opens in new tab) urging the system to restore the SAT and ACT in admissions. Five Nobel laureates joined us, along with professors from across the university, including Beatriz Manz, Berkeley’s first Latina full professor.
We did so because what an admission letter is supposed to mean — that a student is ready to attend the school — no longer matches what we see in our classrooms.
This follow-up report from the New York Post may explain part of the problem:
SF high school where 94% flunk math has California’s highest Berkeley acceptance rate
A San Francisco high school where students get top grades simply for showing up now has the highest acceptance rate in the state to the prestigious University of California, Berkeley — as critics blame rampant grade inflation and rock-bottom standards for a surge in ill-prepared college students who end up dropping out.
Mission High School had a 45% acceptance rate into the elite university, with 34 out of its 76 applicants gaining admission last fall, far ahead of the state average of 15%, according to data compiled by the San Francisco Chronicle.
But it’s not because of superior academics, critics say, but rather because of low standards and a lefty policy that eliminated SAT testing requirements in the University of California system, sending a flood of students who can barely do fractions into demanding courses like Calculus.
“Grades were sometimes too easy to earn,” Levi Lum of Mission High told the San Francisco Standard.
“In many required classes, attendance and basic completion could be enough to receive a grade that would ordinarily signal strong proficiency.”
This is a genuine scandal.
Who benefits from any of this, besides the school that gets all of the tuition dollars? It’s certainly not the students.
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.