Jackson Jambalaya

or when "equity" meets reality

The University of California at San Diego found out the hard way what happens when it lowered standards while high schools inflated grades: Too many kids simply do now know how to do basic math. 

Faced with a surge of remedial math students, the university commissioned a team to study the problem.  After completing its work, the team made some rather candid observations in the final report.  

The report spells out the magnitude of the problem: 

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. Between 2020 and 2025, the number of students whose math skills fall below high school level increased nearly thirtyfold; moreover, 70% of those students fall below middle school levels, reaching roughly one in twelve members of the entering cohort.2 This deterioration coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects on education, the elimination of standardized testing, grade inflation, and the expansion of admissions from under-resourced high schools. The combination of these factors has produced an incoming class increasingly unprepared for the quantitative and analytical rigor expected at UC San Diego...

We can only help so many students, and only when the gaps they need to overcome are within reach...

Unfortunately, the kids were not just deficient in high school math subjects, so poorly educated were they:  

Alarmingly, the instructors running the 2023-2024 Math 2 courses observed a marked change in the skill gaps compared to prior years. While Math 2 was designed in 2016 to remediate missing high school math knowledge, now most students had knowledge gaps that went back much further, to middle and even elementary school. To address the large number of underprepared students, the Mathematics Department redesigned Math 2 for Fall 2024 to focus entirely on elementary and middle school Common Core math subjects (grades 1-8), and introduced a new course, Math 3B, so as to cover missing high-school common core math subjects (Algebra I, Geometry, Algebra II or Math I, II, III; grades 9-11). (KF: No surprise. When I used to tutor Algebra, it was amazing how many students did not know how to do fractions.)....

Naturally, the pandemic is partly to blame:  

Beginning in the spring of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced both K-12 and higher education institutions to conduct classes online, leading to a well-documented decline in student preparedness...

Blaming the pandemic, however, only masks the bigger problem.  The university junked the SAT and ACT requirements in 2021 with predictable results:  

In 2020, the University of California Board of Regents, against the advice of the report by the Academic Senate’s Standardized Testing Task Force (STTF), voted to eliminate the SAT and ACT from admissions consideration. Beginning with the cohort entering in 2021, standardized test scores were no longer used in the admissions process. (p.17)

The decision aimed to broaden the applicant pool, based on concerns that otherwise qualified students were deterred from applying by standardized testing requirements.

The elimination of standardized testing resulted in more reliance on high school grades even though the STTF report notes the worrisome trend of grade inflation in many schools that had already been substantial in 2020.8 During COVID, grade inflation and lowered standards in California high schools likely accelerated. The disruption created by COVID made it very difficult to objectively evaluate students. Many classes moved from letter grade to pass/fail for that period, and teachers often felt compelled to lower grading standards in acknowledgement of students’ special challenges.

As a result, the quality of the information UC received from school transcripts became less reliable as a gauge of how well a student will succeed if admitted....

The elimination of standardized testing together with COVID resulted in a mismatch between students’ course level/grades and their actual levels of preparation, with far-reaching implications for determining math readiness and course placement.

The report does a nice job of diagnosing the problem.  However, reality runs into social justice in the report as it struggles with serving the disadvantaged who are unprepared for college while providing a college education: 

Given that, as a public university, we are charged by the Board of Regents to serve all segments of California’s college-aged students, we cannot simply admit only from better-resourced schools, this would replicate privilege and fail to support our mission as an institution that promotes social mobility. From a more practical perspective, we would also be unable to meet our enrollment targets. This situation goes to the heart of the present conundrum: in order to holistically admit a diverse and representative class, we need to admit students who may be at a higher risk of not succeeding...

The report recommends implementing several measures: 

* Calculating a math-only GPA for graduates whose majors will require a "strong math preparation."  

*  Create a "math index" that considers basic math courses taken (Algebra I & II, Geometry), more advanced math courses, quality of high school, math GPA,  and average grade in non-basic math courses

* Administer a math placement test by June 1, before the freshman fall semester.  This allows university to place students in remedial math courses during the summer term. 

* Advise schools there is "evidence of grade inflation" and inferior math instruction. 

before casting social justice by the wayside: 

The majority of the workgroup recommends that our representative on the Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools (BOARS) should advocate for a systemwide reexamination of the possible return to standardized testing, following the lead of some other institutions that have recently reinstated such measures. This recommendation follows directly from the findings in this report that high school math grades are only very weakly linked to students’ actual math preparation. In fact, for more than two decades the Mathematics Department has found that out of all available student data, the single best predictor for math placement has been the SAT (math section) score, with the ACT score being an equally good predictor. The Math department still uses these scores as the best predictor for math placement if the student provides this data after they are admitted...

It is noted several California universities took the same path but changed course and reinstated SAT and ACT requirements after they experienced similar problems.   

The report is a warning for those who want to lower standards in the name of equity.  Meanwhile, the Chinese are kicking our ass in education.