Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM

I used to teach high school math. There was a big push for doing everything digitally. And admittedly, for some topics the use of technology in the classroom or at home can really be a benefit, for instance visualizations or interactive exercises. But having a digital device in class was the number one cause of distraction every time.

For a lot of things, good old blackboards are just fine as are pen + paper exercises. Maybe even for most high school math. That was frowned upon though by the higher ranks. If I was evaluated as a teacher and didn't include some iPad shenanigans in the class that I was getting audited for, I would have been in trouble. How behind the times!

I got along really well with most of my teenage students, it was a lot of fun interacting with them. But the politics behind it all got too annoying. Also, you're under very tight control on what you teach and how, that was super annoying. So I stopped teaching a few years ago and never looked back.

I can’t help comparing this to the system I grew up in (Italy), which is vastly different and it seemingly produces very good graduates.

University was free and there was no test for enrolling in STEM degrees, and you could retry exams every semester as much as you wanted to. But goddamit exams were HARD and if you weren’t prepared enough you would keep failing until you gave up. We weren’t entitled because we weren’t paying customers.

Also because Italy is Italy we had unlimited beer and wine on tap in the canteen. For real.

>“We now observe preparation gaps so severe that instructors must reteach middle-school mathematics while simultaneously teaching the material students need for sciences, engineering, economics, and other quantitatively demanding fields,” they warned.

i dont understand why the teachers would go out of their way to reteach middle-school math.

i teach. my courses have prerequisites. if a student somehow makes it into my class without a passing-grade grasp of the prerequisites, i will point them in the right direction to get caught up, but i am not spending any class time on it. its not fair to the other students.

This doesn't surprise me at all. From what I can tell, California's education system has moved from "equality" (which I would define as providing similar opportunities to all the kids) to focusing on "equity" (which I think they define as dictating the same outcome for all kids).

To get an idea of how off the rails this has gotten, go read up on their statements trying to justify banning high school calculus. They explicitly (in the abstract / introduction of their plan) reject the idea that some kids are more talented at some things than other kids, so if you can compute a derivative by 12th grade, it's due to racial discrimination benefiting you or something. On a related note, instead of writing some Rust code, today, I think I'll go paint a Banksy or something after I finish my coffee.

That plan caused a lot of uproar and was blocked before being implemented.

Anecdotally, when I asked our local public school for a copy of the curriculum, the teacher said they just teach common core. If you go to the common core website, somewhere towards the top it makes it clear that it is not a curriculum, and just meant to be a lower bar that gets supplemented.

Personally, I think all funding in California education (other than terminal levels like 4 year bachelors and up) should be a function of the percentage of students that succeed at the next step.

If a local district starts losing funding, then it would have to close / shrink schools, and people from outside the educational system would be allowed to establish independent (secular) charter schools within the district.

Those schools would also not be paid unless the students do well in the next phase of their education. This solves the problem of trying to use this as a curriculum back door for climate denial and Islamophobia (or whatever the red states are pushing).

I'm in the SF bay area w/ middle school and high school age kids.

Between San Jose and San Francisco, 15%-30% of kids are in private school (it's 30% in SF where the public schools are extra dysfunctional). That's far above the California statewide average of 8% in private school.

Among our peers, somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 of kids are doing advanced math outside of school, typically either Russian School of Math or Art of Problem Solving. This group only partially overlaps with the private school group. This is happening despite the fact that both public and private school teachers strongly discourage math outside of school!

So by decelerating math in the public school, incentives were created for privileged parents to take matters in their own hands and put their kids into programs that accelerate math education far beyond what public schools used to do. We now have a system that is creating even wider disparities in outcomes. It stands to reason that it's producing far less equitable outcomes, too, given that extremely bright kids who happen to be in lower-resourced schools have fewer opportunities. Universal screening for giftedness, advanced public school math courses, and the SAT -- all avenues for advancement regardless of background -- were all eliminated.

Looking at the world, it seems we all go through similar systemic issues. Naturally, in East Asian cultures where the fervor for education is overheated, this phenomenon tended to manifest much earlier.

When specific exams are abolished or watered down under the banner of 'diversity and equal opportunity,' the wealthy actually gain a massive advantage. Of course, the exam system itself inherently favors the rich as well.

The reason is simple: weakening exams naturally forces the strengthening of alternative metrics. During the transition period when a new system is introduced to society, wealthy parents are far better equipped to adapt than poorer ones.

Korea’s 'Spoon Class Theory' (where rich parents are gold spoons and poor parents are dirt spoons) and Japan’s 'Parent Gacha' (parent lottery) stem from this exact dynamic.

Sure, standardized testing benefits the wealthy because they can hire top-tier tutors. However, when the rules of the system change entirely, the underprivileged simply do not have the buffer or resources to keep up with the shift.

Why do we have such an easy time accepting peoples intrinsic athletic ability and such a difficult time accepting people's intrinsic mental ability?

To me this is a 1:1 comparison, but people lose their mind when I make the comparison. College isn't for everyone just like amateur league sport isn't for everyone.

I feel like I am going to a minor league baseball game and seeing a shortstop on the field with the motor control of a toddler, and while everyone is cheering them, I think I'm taking crazy pills wondering who the hell steered this guy towards baseball his whole life.

  "In 11th grade, the most relevant grade relating to college readiness, 30.5% of students met or exceeded math learning standards. Of these, nearly half exceeded the learning standard — marking them as likely to be the best prepared for a college STEM major."

You can see this 30.5% in the 'grade 11' chart on this page: https://tools.encona.com/caaspp-explorer#slots=state&s=math

Politicians in California want the ethnic mix of students at public universities to reflect the ethnic mix of the state population. They cannot achieve this goal if colleges use academic preparedness as the main factor in admissions:

https://tools.encona.com/caaspp-explorer#slots=state%7E76%2C...

Academics presumably have multiple reasons to want students showing up having mastered the prerequisites of whichever class they're taking.

As a product of the STEM post-SAT UC system (UCLA ‘26), I never personally experienced “middle school math” being taught or a lack of mathematical understanding.

I’ve had my fair share of classes which throw you into the deep end and not many which coddle you. Never seen any professor teaching middle school mathematics. A lot of professors started off with a vague idea of prerequisites, covered the basic ideas and usually go straight into the deep end with new material. It is up to the student to make sure they are acquainted with the prerequisites, go to discussions or office hours to ask TAs or the professor, or just drop the class and do it next quarter (without penalty). At least in my four years at UCLA, we have ample opportunity to do it and the TAs are 90% empathetic towards “stupid questions.”

So in my personal opinion, I think profs shouldn’t be wasting time teaching basic math and there are more than enough opportunities for the student to learn it at their time in the UC.

Years ago, students would take placement exams when they enrolled in the community college. This was great for their education. They would spend a year or two getting to college level english and math.

That program is expensive and apparently made people “feel bad”. The colleges were no longer allowed to require placement tests. Then they were no longer allowed to offer remedial courses (courses that did not count toward a degree) and students went directly into college english and math.

The failure rates are astounding. About 1 in 3 at a large CC.

This issue is trickling up from k-12 being required to “pass” everyone to the colleges with that same pressure.

We need our policy to focus on education achievement rather than number-of-degrees. The incentive is short sighted and the ramifications could result in our local economies declining with ineffective employees, fewer successful businesses, etc.

My nephews came to the US in their early teens as non English speakers. They struggled in some of the courses but still got good grades reported to their parents. So, apparently some teachers will put them on a bus together with other minorities and take them on a day trip to the museum instead of math class, but they would still get graded. They retuned back to Spain and had a very difficult time graduating from high school because of math. So I’m not sure how well of a predictor high school is.

MIT dropped the SAT requirement only to bring it back a few years ago: https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/we-are-reinstating-our....

Dropping standardized test requirements is disconcerting. Of all of the institutions that should be making decisions neutrally based on the evidence, it’s universities. The fact that even institutions like MIT changed their admissions policies according to ideas that aren’t backed by evidence.

So just to be clear, I guess the issue isn't so much SAT or placement tests as it is that there's no functional baseline level of knowledge without some kind of entry exam, and without that there's no functional boundary on the starting place or length of time it will take to get a degree. So some level of entry exam is needed to avoid rebuilding a new remedial version of K12 education inside of every four year college?

I think the focus on the SAT as a mechanism for this detracts from this as the SAT isn't really an designed to sus out topical placement, right?

It's very astonishing that sometime I heard folks with very high SAT including math /science/programming accolades failed to get admission in UCs but you have severe math deficit like this.

Is this really surprising to anyone? Especially the oldies?

I remember decades ago when I started high school. We were all given laptops, but the teachers had a whole lecture on when to use laptops and for what.

One thing that stuck with me was how one of the teachers pointed out that we should still take notes and do our homework on physical notebooks, this is because we learn better that way. Things stick to our memory much more when we write it with our hand compared to writing it on the computer.

We were supposed to use electronics as little as possible until we grasp the subject. Pen and paper is enough in the beginning.

We have truly entered a era where electronic devices is part of our daily life, its now a necessity to have it on us at all times. Of all the places, I would have expected schools to be sensitive towards whats allowed in class and whatnot.

If I could decide, I would have banned all electronic devices in class (there is exceptions of course).

> "We now observe preparation gaps so severe that instructors must reteach middle-school mathematics while simultaneously teaching the material students need for sciences, engineering, economics, and other quantitatively demanding fields,” they warned.

When I was a grad student in a mediocre university in a different state thirty years ago we had a lot of kids in a similar situation. This was resolved by means of a pre-placement exam, and the ones who scored the worst had to take one of two remedial math classes, the lower of which was solidly at the middle school level. The university had a SAT requirement at the time.

The pre-placement exam had two versions that were used on alternate days, and a student could take it as often as they liked.

This may be a new experience for those particular UC faculty, but it is not a new phenomenon.

Out of the current population of college students today, what percentage shouldn't really be there, be it for lack of intelligence or too much? (e.g. smart ceo guy dropping out.) 10%? 20%? 50%? If you can't do high school level math, much less middle school, do you deserve to be in college? It really strikes at what the purpose of college is: is it for educating people, no matter their prior abilities? Or is it to foster our best and brightest to put them on a path towards advancing society? Or is it to create well-rounded individuals, knowledgeable in many different domains? I admit, perhaps the purpose is all of the above, but if so, things that try to be everything for everyone often have to make sacrifices in one area to improve another.

> professors are often teaching middle school math to incoming students.

Even after admissions, why aren't they using placement tests and prerequisites to handle this? Also why would you try to teach someone middle school math during a STEM class in college instead of just... urging them to drop the class and letting their grades reflect their competency if they choose to stay?

It's weird to me that standardized tests were demonized as anti-equity rather than GPA. You can always get extra help with homework, projects, etc. if you have a better funded support system. Single subject/unit tests in high school are also much more narrow in scope and easier to prepare for. A standardized test on the other hand is so wide in breadth that raw abilities will shine more.

There is a real doozy of an issue bured in there, which was reported when it originally happened but I felt it never got the public censure it deserved:

> But the vote went against the UC Academic Senate’s own Standardized Testing Task Force, which said use of test scores could actually boost admission rates for students from disadvantaged backgrounds and school districts.

The UC actually commissioned a faculty panel to investigate whether requiring test scores undercut the changes of disadvantaged students, and the panel found the opposite effect, and yet the administration got rid of the tests anyway. This is the clearest indication to me that the policymakers are entirely concerned with image and symbolism and not with any actual attempt to help anyone. They did the exact thing that their own people told them would hurt the very people they were ostensibly trying to help.

Something many people here miss: UCSD is a selective institution. UC San Diego’s most recent published first-year acceptance rate is about 28.4% for fall 2025, based on 136,740 applicants and 38,846 admits. UCSD’s own admissions page also summarizes this as a 28% admit rate. The lousy students aren't even going to apply since they know they will be rejected. So we are not talking about an open enrollment institution where you would expect a significant number of students to need remedial math help; we are talking about the cream of the crop of California high school graduates many of which don't know high school math.

The root cause of the collapse in math education in California is one bad researcher's work, combined with politics.

Briefly, a Stanford-affiliated "researcher" named Jo Boaler produced two deeply underpowered studies claiming to show that putting all students in the same grade-level math course led to better outcomes for everyone — even the kids that would've normally been tracked into advanced math. But she only tested results on grade-level math — of course the would-be advanced kids did better on "grade level" math if they've taken it recently. The loss is the advanced math they didn't take.

Here's an article: https://stanfordreview.org/jo-boaler-and-the-woke-math-death...

I fought with my son's middle school administration about this precise issue. It is the stated policy of CA's state level education department to de-emphasize advanced math and tracking, in favor of these deeply suspect ideas. I'm pretty progressive in general, but this is braindead stupid, alarming, and self-defeating. (If you care about equity, you NEED to have options in the public school for the underprivileged gifted kids! the rich kids have lots of options and will be fine.)

It's deeply depressing, but education has long been a weak spot for California; since Prop 13 in the 1970s, California has been 49th or 50th in per-pupil funding for public education (excluding college, I think). But to compound that with this wrongheaded, moronic, politically suspect and quantitatively incorrect policy is... infuriating.

We need to ensure a diverse student body - by making sure that smart kids of every race, class, and culture are given a thorough math education.

The K-12 public schools in California fail too many kids; and far too many poor, minority kids. Rather than fix this, we ban 8th grade algebra because we don't like the racial makeup of the advanced math track.

We can, in fact, have it both ways. But it will take change and be resisted by people who, ironically, claim to be helping the poor minorities most hurt today.

Getting rid of the SAT was a huge mistake and many Universities are finally seeing it for the problems it's caused. The fact that so many students are getting into the UC system and not able to do high school level algebra is one of the symptoms of it. The Cal State System is also having the same issues, we now give University credit for remedial (high school level) Mathematics and English courses.

The lack of any subject level standardised US high school certification to prove skill-level for matriculation still boggles my mind. I realise this is fundamentally a curriculum issue, as it’s set at a local level. There’s AP, but that’s not universally available.

If STEM degrees produce low quality graduates, the value of degree decreases:

1. Employers must add more math testing before hiring to see that they get what they need.

2. Wages drop to with match the knowledge and skill. Become prompt engineer $25/h no permanent job.

3. Immigrants to the rescue!

If you're admitting students to Berkeley who can't figure out how to independently close gaps in their own knowledge quickly (formal or otherwise), you have bigger problems.

I self-taught a bunch of remedial math when I went back to University after many years out. Khan Academy exists. Math tutors exist. They don't just exist, they're amazing.

If I can self-teach basic sequences and series or polynomial factorization or whatever at the age of 30 while juggling a full time job and a full computer science syllabus, an unemployed Berkeley freshman shouldn't struggle with it unless they have a legitimate disability or something.

This is criminal that these students aren't graduating with a solid math education, regardless of what major they are going into. Math isn't only for STEM majors! Fix k-12 for everyone.

The open letter from UC faculty is here.

https://ucstudentsuccess.org/

My son is in 4th grade (nominally anyway, we homeschool so it doesn't really matter). He takes the MAP test periodically, which scores on a single scale for all grades. You can look up the percentile score for your student's grade, as well as where that score sits on the percentiles for all other grades.

He's ahead in some areas, having some skills from as far as 7th grade, but mostly he's more in the 5th grade band by now. His MAP test score is 50th percentile for 12th grade. This means, basically, he knows more math than 50% of 12th graders who take the MAP test.

This really blew my mind at first, but these kinds of single-scale tests are really valuable for this purpose. We should be reaching for a solid absolute standard, not grading everything on a curve and passing people who haven't demonstrated real mastery.

The critical difference between SAT and high school grades, of course, is that high school grades are easy to fake, especially on the school level (both ways, up and down).

Schools being organized the way they are, in most locations high school grades is code for letting the local government decide who gets to go to university and who doesn't.

All I have to say is LOL to holistic admissions.

Use standardized testing. We cannot power the future with feels, we need STEM grads.

Web site built for the petition campaign:

https://ucstudentsuccess.org/

Direct link to its FAQ page:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dxdfw0gIE2UW9k5cqtf6FVMaclI...

And here's the slick 50-page, double-column manifesto from the UC establishment, unsigned of course, on the subject -- giving us a sense of the scale of the bureaucratic blob that the petitioners are up against:

https://www.ucop.edu/institutional-research-academic-plannin...

> We now observe preparation gaps so severe that instructors must reteach middle-school mathematics while simultaneously teaching the material students need for sciences, engineering, economics, and other quantitatively demanding fields

I was annoyed to not find specifics. I would be surprised if the K12 school board and university STEM professors are in agreement about what middle school mathematics is.

Trig comes to mind as a common stumbling block. I could be forgetting, but I don't recall much of it on the SAT. If I had to pick one area of math where the gap between learning something initially and actually being shown its broader applicability is the longest, it would be that. Like a decade between SOHCAHTOA and diffeq / fourier probably.

I think this is a Global phenomenon guys. In my humble opinion STEAM kids will need to be assigned 2 agents (quite honestly, I think every kid)... a digital brain and a digital tutor(s). We also have to revamp the entire curriculum, just hear me out; Why do we not memorize binary or assembly in computer science? Why do we allow calculators after a certain grade? Because we have abstracted large portions of the lower level structures in those disciplines. The medical industry is suppose to be revamping requirements for medical professions, and I think the STEAM programs should do the same.

Anecdotal data point: My son is finishing 9th grade, and he's taking 10th grade math because he got ahead a year when he was younger. At his school, you're exempted from having to take the final exam if you're passing with a reasonable grade at the end of the semester. He said there are about four students who don't have to take the final exam.

Math has always been hard to teach well, because issues with earlier math classes compound so much. With all the societal interruptions to education, and the impact of addictive tech on young people's minds, it's only gotten more difficult.

>Critics call the SAT inequitable and say high school grades are a good predictor of college success.

I mean, it seems pretty clear from the last 6 years of experience by professors and others that grades (or at least grades in isolation) aren't a good predictor at all for this. The problem is removing the use of standardized tests here was done for ideological reasons. You can already tell by the use of the word "inequitable" here, because a certain insane subset of policymakers and the public believe that we should push for equal outcomes ("equity") over equal opportunity (usually referred to as simply "equality").

Community College is the way to go for most students. The UCs cost too much, for the first 2 years you can either spend 2400$ at a community college or 32k at a UC.

Even if your family has the money, put that extra 30k in an index and you have a home down payment by the time you finish school.

>Board members cited concerns the tests were biased against students of color and those from lower-income families — including students who did not have access to prep courses.

Ehh, you can't balance the world so easily. I was never going to go straight to a 4 year college because I didn't have a stable home situation.

Please, not the SAT!

My son is prepping for the SAT and I am helping him. I studied physics and computer science, and was a advanced math A+ student...

IMHO: The SAT is useless, solving equations under artificial time constraints is something that only happens in these kind of tests. The focus is on solving problems fast and getting a good score, and nobody really cares if you understand the math behind it.

So, please, if you go back to testing, find something more useful than the SAT.

What did they expect to happen? Is it one of those things when they say "They may be a professor but they can't tie their shoes!". Surely, they should have seen it coming.

I see quotes from faculty there about this being "unexpected", like "the bottom dropped out". Are they just pretending to be surprised or actually surprised...