Over a thousand faculty and staff for the University of California have signed an open letter, begging the university to reinstate standardized testing requirements for incoming science and mathematics majors.
The letter reveals that up to a third of first semester calculus students in the California university system bombed their math diagnostic tests, as just one example of the disturbing numbers the letter highlighted to make the case for reinstating SAT and ACT requirements. UC eliminated its requirement for standardized test scores for applicants back in 2020, during the educationally disastrous COVID-19 lockdowns, and it has been all downhill since then. The SAT and ACT are hardly the gold standards of academic rigor nowadays, but they are at least a bare minimum threshold, which numerous UC students simply cannot meet.
UC STEM professors and staff are dealing with a motley assortment of students with wildly differing competency levels. "Basic mathematical fluency is analogous to literacy," and success at a university in STEM classes is "structurally unattainable for students" who don't have it, the UC letter — last updated May 30 — explains. "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."
Nor is the huge range of skill levels fair to students who are prepared. Meanwhile, UC professors predict yet longer times to achieve degrees and fewer people completing STEM majors. UC students need to spend less time protesting for “Palestine” and more time with the multiplication table.
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The letter provides some data:
The UC San Diego Senate-Administration Workgroup on Admissions report documents this crisis in stark terms: in the last five years, the number of students whose mathematics 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. These findings are corroborated by data across our campuses. For example, for three consecutive years, 20-30% of UC Berkeley first-semester calculus students who participated in mathematical diagnostic testing displayed severe preparation deficits.
While complimenting UC on helping what they called underresourced students pick up the slack in math, they also emphasize that there are only so many students who can receive university resources this way. And as my personal note, if you can’t meet the basic qualifications for entering college, which are lower now than almost any other time in history, you shouldn’t be in college. Part of the problem with our modern system is that loads of jobs require college degrees that don’t really need them. And huge numbers of American youth attend university for little more reason than to get an extremely expensive job qualification or because it gives them four more years to put off adulthood.
I think the unfortunate conclusion of all this is that leftist Commies set out to turn our education system into little more than a political and sexual indoctrination system, teaching little if anything useful and academic, and they were all too successful.
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