Harvard is not alone. UC students Without 8th Grade Math Skills Skyrockets

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Problem is they don’t remember it when they take it in 6-7 grades.

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/11/ucsd-faculty-sound-alarm-on-declining-student-skills.html
Take a look at UCSD's remedial math class. It's elementary school math! Don't remember it? Got to be kidding me.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Problem is they don’t remember it when they take it in 6-7 grades.

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/11/ucsd-faculty-sound-alarm-on-declining-student-skills.html
Take a look at UCSD's remedial math class. It's elementary school math! Don't remember it? Got to be kidding me.

OMG, ok, that's bad

[Anonymous]

The top UCs do admit a fair number of very unqualified kids chasing the rankings to earn political points within the state and social mobility points. These kids do get screwed. They get shuffled into easy, unemployable majors. They are encouraged to take some classes on line in a community college and transfer the credits over. They often lose scholarships or aid tied to maintaining a mid to high GPA and then need to take loans. They take 7 years to graduate. They drop out.

But hey, UCSD rose in the rankings because of this game. This makes the school more popular with top students who will glom together anyway. It doesn’t really hurt the top kids who get in at all.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:https://www.newsweek.com/students-ucsd-without-8th-grade-math-skills-skyrockets-11030373

18% UC students placed below Algebra 1.

Among the students not meeting middle school math levels:
42% had taken precalculus or calculus. And 25% of these students had a math GPA of 4.0 in high school.


Takeaway is that you can't trust high school GPA.
4.0 in Calculus can't pass Algebra. Something is going on.

GPA and course titles have become unreliable predictors of readiness.

4.0 math gpa in high school yet can't pass middle school placement?

High schools are not teaching kids anymore. How did they get through high school math to get 4.0?

This is why the UK schools don't bother asking for GPA. They only want SAT/ACT and AP scores and they tell you exactly what the cutoff numbers for those are.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Problem is they don’t remember it when they take it in 6-7 grades.

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/11/ucsd-faculty-sound-alarm-on-declining-student-skills.html
Take a look at UCSD's remedial math class. It's elementary school math! Don't remember it? Got to be kidding me.

Question 30: Only 2% can answer it?
Question 1: kindergarten math. Still only 75% can answer it!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Isn't it good that they are catching this and students can learn math properly? Some high schools don't have good math teachers. Not everyone is able to go to good public/private schools with good teaching. Also, the fact that numbers have tripled in recent years probably has to do with covid, online learning, and just bad math teachers.

+1 Yes, it is good that they are addressing this. What is the alternative no admission for any kids from crappy elementary through high schools that they have zero choice in?

It's working fine for them

Obviously not.

[Anonymous]

Test optional/test blind combined with cobid shutdown of many schools for over a year led to this disaster. It will swing back to sanity soon

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I didn't see this mentioned upthread, but current calc students were taking algebra 1 via virtual learning, and California held on much longer with virtual than a lot of other places.

We are in a different state, but my junior in calc BC has all kinds of holes from prealgebra in 6th (20-21 school year), which was mostly virtual. Lots of bad habits (yes, googling answers, not doing homework, etc). This shows up randomly, like in SAT prep.

(and after getting a 5 on AP Precalc)

Lots of people do very well in calculus even though they are horrible at algebra. I think this is because calculus is much easier to understand conceptually, so if the test is primarily on those concepts, you'll do well. The algebra part of calculus is where you'll mess up.

It’s because curriculum has been rewritten to get students to calc. So rather than drilling computation, a lot of the build up is qualitative: this graph has two roots, this function is increasing, etc. The middle school algebra class today is very different from a generation ago.

[Anonymous]

If UC San Diego was serious about this crisis, it would immediately demand to see ap exam scores in calc ab, calc bc, lang and literature

[Anonymous]

Now I am really curious to see Harvard’s remedial math class material. They are meeting every day five days a week at Harvard’s remedial class. That must be really bad, to catch up all the missing contents in high school.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Yeah, the math thing is crazy these days. My kid is at an Ivy and was given a math placement test at the beginning of freshman year. He took Calculus AB in high school and was placed into Calculus 2. However it turns out that almost all his classmates took BC in high school. Except most did not actually learn the BC because they are now getting Cs and Ds in this course (the average on the exams has been in the 60s).
My kid has had two 99% so far and he is a humanities kid. He attended a grade-deflating, private high school which rarely accelerated kids in math.

How are these kids getting 60% on material that they already took in high school? And yet of course they got high As in high school as they got into an Ivy.

The state of high school math education is worrisome.

Those kids probably also got 5s on the AP test. My humanities kid at a UC is very scared of taking math next quarter. He placed into UC’s last Calculus level which is supposedly after BC not sure if that maps to II or III . He had As in high school, 5 on the AP exam and 780 on SAT math but he’s hearing from so many kids with similar stats who are getting Cs and Ds and who are engineering kids that like math.

Is the problem these kids are not learning the material or are they not retaining the material? If they are indeed earning 5s on an AP exam then I would argue the latter... How do you fix that? I don't know.

The College Board has been explicitly making AP tests easier, because they found that they were losing kids to lightweight dual enrollment classes. I will give you three guesses as to the likely response by the providers of those dual enrollment classes, and the first two don't count.

[Anonymous]

My kid was a 2023 grad, so covid started in 9th grade for him. For 2024-2026 grads, covid started during middle school (6-8). I know from our covid experience that while I was more worried about their language arts works, my kids actually struggled more in math during that time. If a school district loosened standards to just get through the year and them moved kids forward, which I'd bet money most everyone did, I can see how a situation like this could happen.

Then there is this from the article...

Remedial math placements correlate closely with prior school conditions.

Imagine what their school/living conditions were like during the covid years.

[Anonymous]

Underreported is that the UC SD study also said a large percentage of their student body couldn't string two sentences together and their vocab was especially deficient. The cohort tested in college now was pre-AI for the most part.

So other than sucking at math and writing, UC San Diego students are thriving.

Too bad there isn't a standardized test that could gauge a person's proficiency in such subjects.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:https://www.newsweek.com/students-ucsd-without-8th-grade-math-skills-skyrockets-11030373

18% UC students placed below Algebra 1.

Among the students not meeting middle school math levels:
42% had taken precalculus or calculus. And 25% of these students had a math GPA of 4.0 in high school.


Takeaway is that you can't trust high school GPA.
4.0 in Calculus can't pass Algebra. Something is going on.

GPA and course titles have become unreliable predictors of readiness.

4.0 math gpa in high school yet can't pass middle school placement?

High schools are not teaching kids anymore. How did they get through high school math to get 4.0?

This is why the UK schools don't bother asking for GPA. They only want SAT/ACT and AP scores and they tell you exactly what the cutoff numbers for those are.

This isn’t true

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Now I am really curious to see Harvard’s remedial math class material. They are meeting every day five days a week at Harvard’s remedial class. That must be really bad, to catch up all the missing contents in high school.

The material is the same as their regular class. They just meet two extra days a week for extra lecture time. They have pointed this out multiple times but people just can’t drop there preconceived biases.