Last year, a report compiled at one of California’s most prestigious public universities revealed that a significant percentage of incoming freshmen struggled with basic math. Others lacked elementary writing and language skills.
A recent revolt by University of California faculty members now indicates the rot is systemwide.
In October, a joint faculty-administration committee at UC San Diego warned that, “Over the past five years,” the school “has experienced a steep decline in the academic preparation of its entering first-year students. … This trend poses serious challenges both to student success and to the university’s instructional mission.”
The committee discovered that one in 12 students lacked the math skills necessary to succeed at seventh-grade levels.
Notably, most of these students “earned” outstanding grades in high school. Also, notably, the UC Board of Regents, in a tip of the cap to left-wing “diversity” and “equity” concerns, stopped requiring the SAT or ACT in 2020.
This week, the controversy returned as more than 600 University of California professors, led by mathematicians at UC Berkeley, sent a letter to system leaders expressing concerns about the readiness of incoming students, the Los Angeles Times reported.
“We now observe preparation gaps so severe,” the letter observes, “that instructors must reteach middle-school mathematics while simultaneously teaching the material students need for sciences, engineering, economics and other quantitatively demanding fields.”
One of the organizers of the letter, Zvezda Stankova, a mathematics professor at Berkeley, told the Times that she has seen the problems firsthand in her classroom.
“Something had changed drastically,” she said about a 2023 calculus class. “The bottom was taken out, and there were 25 to 30 percent of the students who were in free fall. There was nothing you could do for them. They were just not prepared.”
The letter calls for the system to reinstate reliance on college prep exams, “saying that six years of test-free admissions has not reliably assessed readiness, and professors are often teaching middle school math to incoming students,” the Times reported.
The idea that standardized tests are an insurmountable barrier to minority students is an example of the bigotry of low expectations. The idea that universities can maintain high academic standards and produce graduates prepared to handle the rigors of the real world by dumbing-down admission standards is similarly misguided.
Expect the professors’ plea to run into fierce resistance, but California reaps what it sows. It provides an unfortunate example of the dangers of progressive education fads intended to advance a political ideology rather than encourage academic achievement.
