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

[Anonymous]

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.

DS’s math teacher tells everyone to retake calc 2 in college, even if they get a 5 on the AP, because apparently AP is not teaching enough calculus curriculum anymore. College is more rigorous about calculus content

I took Calc AB as a junior in HS and got a 5 on the AP exam. My university did not accept AP credit for science major-required math courses, so I had to take Calculus again. I thought it would be easy, didn't spend any time studying, and got a C (one of those midterm- and final exam-only classes). I'm sure I am not uncommon in this outcome.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I know someone who went to Broad Run who said they read excepts of books instead of books. In AP Lit!

This came up because I was joking about the new Wuthering Heights adaptation and she said she never read it. She said they read excepts of books from a long list to prep for the AP exam.

So don’t assume it’s a certain kind of kid being underserved by the education system.

LOL this! We are in Silicon Valley. The physics, chem, and engineering classes are top notch. My oldest was building circuit boards in her courses while her cousin north of Sacramento was making a kitchen cutting board in his. Crazy difference in rigor and curriculum. However, math, english and history are a joke at our school. APUSH had zero required reading, tests were vocabulary and multiple choice with one or two short answer questions. The second semester was basic test prep from the college board resources. My youngest was so annoyed that the teacher, in an effort to bring up grades of the lower performing kids let everyone drop their worst test AND if you showed up for the AP test you got an extra 100% test score. My youngest ended up doing all his senior year classes in the local community college honors program.

APUSH has never had required reading, because the point is to give the teacher flexibility on how they want to teach content. You don’t have to do a daily 100 pages of reading to understand the content in APUSH. The ideal is English courses holding the weight of forcing students to read lengthy passages and novels, and history be focused on analyzing sources, interpreting basic legal decisions in conversation with fields, and getting a comprehensive thread of how our country developed.

I’m more resistant, because historical writing is particularly dry and repetitive. Historians like to lay out their deck of cards and don’t really engage in flair. It’s good we teach our children but also engage them.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I think you will see most of the privates go back to test mandatory, following the lead of the Ivies. The past 5 years has been a wake up call. Whereas before the College Board was being castigated by equity/social science researchers, we now see that there is overwhelming evidence of the validity of the SAT.

Duke, UChicago, Vanderbilt will go back to being test mandatory. It will percolate down to schools in the rest of the T50.

And I will never understand why Duke, Chicago, Vanderbilt, Princeton, Columbia, WashU, Harvey Mudd and basically every school in California remain test optional in 2025. They all get the top students regardless. And they all had the top scoring students in the pre-Covid era. Mystifying. Getting more apps from unqualified students seems more a burden than anything else.

[Anonymous]

I’ll be the first to admit it: raising a teenager in Silicon Valley does something strange to your sense of “normal.” When every other kid seems to be launching a startup out of their bedroom or casually chatting about reinforcement learning over lunch, you start to lose perspective. And yet--even with that adjusted baseline --I can say without hesitation that my kid operates on an entirely different plane.

Most parents tell me their high schoolers are “into STEM.” Cute. Meanwhile, my kid is modeling plasma behavior for a fusion-energy project because they were “bored with regular physics.” They come home from school, toss their backpack on the floor, and jump straight into debugging some simulation that, frankly, I can’t even pronounce half the variables in. I once tried to ask what the project was about, and after a fifteen-minute explanation involving nonlinear differential equations, I found myself nodding like one of those dashboard bobbleheads, hoping they wouldn’t quiz me afterward.

The teachers have basically stopped suggesting enrichment. One of them actually pulled me aside and said, “We don’t really have anything else to give them.” I thought she meant extra worksheets or some honors track I hadn’t heard of. No--she meant the entire school had tapped out. They keep handing my kid datasets and letting them run wild because apparently the analyses they produce are “at the level of a postdoc.” The counselor even joked that they should be teaching a class instead of taking one.

And honestly, it’s not like we pushed them. If anything, we were the ones begging them to slow down. While most teens are wrestling with calculus, my kid decided to spend winter break learning tensor calculus “just to understand general relativity properly.” I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen someone so excited about Riemann curvature tensors. When their friends were playing video games, mine was writing a custom simulation engine because existing ones were “too inefficient.”

College tours were almost comical. At one place--an extremely respectable institution--the student guide proudly announced, “Some of our upper-level undergraduates even get to work with machine learning frameworks!” My kid glanced at me with that look teenagers give their parents when something is painfully below their level of existence. On the drive home, they said, “It’s weird that they made such a big deal about that. I built a custom ML model for that wildfire-prediction app in ninth grade.” Ninth grade! I was still trying to figure out graphing calculators in ninth grade.

I know I sound like that parent. Believe me, I hear myself. But it’s sort of impossible not to brag when you watch your teenager navigate concepts that stump grown adults with doctoral degrees. And the wildest part? They’re still just getting started. Every time I think they’ve hit the ceiling, they casually blow a hole straight through it and start climbing again.

So yes--I’m the parent who shows up to meetings with a grin that probably annoys everyone in the room. But raise a kid like mine, and try not to brag. Truly. It’s harder than it looks.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think you will see most of the privates go back to test mandatory, following the lead of the Ivies. The past 5 years has been a wake up call. Whereas before the College Board was being castigated by equity/social science researchers, we now see that there is overwhelming evidence of the validity of the SAT.

Duke, UChicago, Vanderbilt will go back to being test mandatory. It will percolate down to schools in the rest of the T50.

And I will never understand why Duke, Chicago, Vanderbilt, Princeton, Columbia, WashU, Harvey Mudd and basically every school in California remain test optional in 2025. They all get the top students regardless. And they all had the top scoring students in the pre-Covid era. Mystifying. Getting more apps from unqualified students seems more a burden than anything else.

Note, Stanford requires scores.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I’ll be the first to admit it: raising a teenager in Silicon Valley does something strange to your sense of “normal.” When every other kid seems to be launching a startup out of their bedroom or casually chatting about reinforcement learning over lunch, you start to lose perspective. And yet--even with that adjusted baseline --I can say without hesitation that my kid operates on an entirely different plane.

Most parents tell me their high schoolers are “into STEM.” Cute. Meanwhile, my kid is modeling plasma behavior for a fusion-energy project because they were “bored with regular physics.” They come home from school, toss their backpack on the floor, and jump straight into debugging some simulation that, frankly, I can’t even pronounce half the variables in. I once tried to ask what the project was about, and after a fifteen-minute explanation involving nonlinear differential equations, I found myself nodding like one of those dashboard bobbleheads, hoping they wouldn’t quiz me afterward.

The teachers have basically stopped suggesting enrichment. One of them actually pulled me aside and said, “We don’t really have anything else to give them.” I thought she meant extra worksheets or some honors track I hadn’t heard of. No--she meant the entire school had tapped out. They keep handing my kid datasets and letting them run wild because apparently the analyses they produce are “at the level of a postdoc.” The counselor even joked that they should be teaching a class instead of taking one.

And honestly, it’s not like we pushed them. If anything, we were the ones begging them to slow down. While most teens are wrestling with calculus, my kid decided to spend winter break learning tensor calculus “just to understand general relativity properly.” I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen someone so excited about Riemann curvature tensors. When their friends were playing video games, mine was writing a custom simulation engine because existing ones were “too inefficient.”

College tours were almost comical. At one place--an extremely respectable institution--the student guide proudly announced, “Some of our upper-level undergraduates even get to work with machine learning frameworks!” My kid glanced at me with that look teenagers give their parents when something is painfully below their level of existence. On the drive home, they said, “It’s weird that they made such a big deal about that. I built a custom ML model for that wildfire-prediction app in ninth grade.” Ninth grade! I was still trying to figure out graphing calculators in ninth grade.

I know I sound like that parent. Believe me, I hear myself. But it’s sort of impossible not to brag when you watch your teenager navigate concepts that stump grown adults with doctoral degrees. And the wildest part? They’re still just getting started. Every time I think they’ve hit the ceiling, they casually blow a hole straight through it and start climbing again.

So yes--I’m the parent who shows up to meetings with a grin that probably annoys everyone in the room. But raise a kid like mine, and try not to brag. Truly. It’s harder than it looks.

We’ll get ready to pay for private college! Your kid is unlikely to get into the top 6 UCs. Billy or Juanita from Bakersfield who have yet to master middle school math and have never written an essay or read a full book need a shot at becoming engineers!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I know someone who went to Broad Run who said they read excepts of books instead of books. In AP Lit!

This came up because I was joking about the new Wuthering Heights adaptation and she said she never read it. She said they read excepts of books from a long list to prep for the AP exam.

So don’t assume it’s a certain kind of kid being underserved by the education system.

LOL this! We are in Silicon Valley. The physics, chem, and engineering classes are top notch. My oldest was building circuit boards in her courses while her cousin north of Sacramento was making a kitchen cutting board in his. Crazy difference in rigor and curriculum. However, math, english and history are a joke at our school. APUSH had zero required reading, tests were vocabulary and multiple choice with one or two short answer questions. The second semester was basic test prep from the college board resources. My youngest was so annoyed that the teacher, in an effort to bring up grades of the lower performing kids let everyone drop their worst test AND if you showed up for the AP test you got an extra 100% test score. My youngest ended up doing all his senior year classes in the local community college honors program.

APUSH has never had required reading, because the point is to give the teacher flexibility on how they want to teach content. You don’t have to do a daily 100 pages of reading to understand the content in APUSH. The ideal is English courses holding the weight of forcing students to read lengthy passages and novels, and history be focused on analyzing sources, interpreting basic legal decisions in conversation with fields, and getting a comprehensive thread of how our country developed.

I’m more resistant, because historical writing is particularly dry and repetitive. Historians like to lay out their deck of cards and don’t really engage in flair. It’s good we teach our children but also engage them.

No, many schools outside the tech bro world include required reading of at least the Federalist papers. The AP board recommends but doesn’t require readings giving the teacher flexibility but at our school they do nothing, literally nothing. It’s an easy A.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think you will see most of the privates go back to test mandatory, following the lead of the Ivies. The past 5 years has been a wake up call. Whereas before the College Board was being castigated by equity/social science researchers, we now see that there is overwhelming evidence of the validity of the SAT.

Duke, UChicago, Vanderbilt will go back to being test mandatory. It will percolate down to schools in the rest of the T50.

And I will never understand why Duke, Chicago, Vanderbilt, Princeton, Columbia, WashU, Harvey Mudd and basically every school in California remain test optional in 2025. They all get the top students regardless. And they all had the top scoring students in the pre-Covid era. Mystifying. Getting more apps from unqualified students seems more a burden than anything else.

With what has occurred at UC San Diego, the data from every Ivy, it is only a matter of time. Princeton is going back to test mandatory, but for some reason taking its sweet time, doing it for the 2027-2028 year.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

It’s not just UCSD, it’s all of UC schools. UCB, UCLA. All of them.

Also the test optional portions of the test optional schools. Chicago, WashU, Vandy, Duke, Columbia. Anywhere between 30% to 50% students are like those at UCSD.

This linked piece is a banger: https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/when-grades-stop-meaning-anything

"California has already committed to a pathway for higher education for everyone — accessible community colleges and top-tier research universities. If we try to make the top-tier universities also serve the function of community colleges, we will destroy both."

"The aim of equity is not to brag about how many students of a target background you awarded an A in calculus, it’s to ensure that every student actually learns."

[Anonymous]

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that not everyone is equally talented at understanding math, and it isn’t always a teaching issue when they aren’t. And these people who are naturally less gifted aren’t equally distributed across all SES groups.

[Anonymous]

The University of California schools should be a hard lesson to any university who decries the SAT.

What's remarkable about this is the UC's have decades of student performance from every California high school. They know the performance of each high school. In spite of this, they still couldn't do their job right and admit qualified students.

Why ban the SAT? Truly maddening.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The University of California schools should be a hard lesson to any university who decries the SAT.

What's remarkable about this is the UC's have decades of student performance from every California high school. They know the performance of each high school. In spite of this, they still couldn't do their job right and admit qualified students.

Why ban the SAT? Truly maddening.

They are absolutely doing an incredibly well in aligning with their mandate which is to admit the highest performing applicants from every region in the state.

Your angst derives from the simple fact that the highest performing students are not equally distributed across the state.

Your view of doing their job “right” is in conflict with their mandate.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The University of California schools should be a hard lesson to any university who decries the SAT.

What's remarkable about this is the UC's have decades of student performance from every California high school. They know the performance of each high school. In spite of this, they still couldn't do their job right and admit qualified students.

Why ban the SAT? Truly maddening.

Legal protection. The Asian students are always suing. UC has achieved now under representing top white students but struggles with having to over represent top Asian students.

UC tried a ballot measure reinstating affirmative action prior to the Supreme Court ruling, and lost by a landslide. The Latino voters..the biggest bucket now for unqualified admits…overwhelmingly voted against it. UC still wants them. There is no way for the top UCs to achieve 30% Latino, 30% low income and accept either the SAT or CA state tests. The score gap between Latino accepted and Asian or white rejected is upside down and a severe gap.