The University of California, San Diego, is considered one of the nation’s top public universities and was ranked sixth in the nation by U.S. News & World Report's annual survey of American universities. However, a new analysis by the university’s own joint faculty-administration committee reveals that many freshmen can’t do middle-school math. One in eight of UC San Diego freshmen has math skills that “fall below middle-school level,” according to their findings. This is 30 times worse than the 2020 results. The report reads: “Over the past five years, UC San Diego has experienced a steep decline in the academic preparation of its entering first-year students—particularly in mathematics, but also in writing and language skills.”
In May 2020 the UC Board of Regents no longer required Scholastic Aptitude Tests (SAT) for admissions. Like most standardized tests, the SAT or ACT often do not reflect a student’s abilities, and are often criticized as being unfair or biased. However, an earlier faculty senate report noted that these tests “add substantially to UC’s ability to predict student success” beyond high school grades. Many of the low-performing students had received the highest grades in high school math.
However, this problem is not isolated to UC-San Diego. Many “top” college students can’t add fractions. In 2013 California dropped algebra as an eighth-grade requirement. About half of the chairmen of math departments at UC campuses wrote that the “number of first-year students that are unable to start in college-level precalculus” has doubled over the last five years. This used to be a standard course for top sophomores in high schools.
