Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM

This doesn't surprise me at all. From what I can tell, California's education system has moved from "equality" (which I would define as providing similar opportunities to all the kids) to focusing on "equity" (which I think they define as dictating the same outcome for all kids).

To get an idea of how off the rails this has gotten, go read up on their statements trying to justify banning high school calculus. They explicitly (in the abstract / introduction of their plan) reject the idea that some kids are more talented at some things than other kids, so if you can compute a derivative by 12th grade, it's due to racial discrimination benefiting you or something. On a related note, instead of writing some Rust code, today, I think I'll go paint a Banksy or something after I finish my coffee.

That plan caused a lot of uproar and was blocked before being implemented.

Anecdotally, when I asked our local public school for a copy of the curriculum, the teacher said they just teach common core. If you go to the common core website, somewhere towards the top it makes it clear that it is not a curriculum, and just meant to be a lower bar that gets supplemented.

Personally, I think all funding in California education (other than terminal levels like 4 year bachelors and up) should be a function of the percentage of students that succeed at the next step.

If a local district starts losing funding, then it would have to close / shrink schools, and people from outside the educational system would be allowed to establish independent (secular) charter schools within the district.

Those schools would also not be paid unless the students do well in the next phase of their education. This solves the problem of trying to use this as a curriculum back door for climate denial and Islamophobia (or whatever the red states are pushing).

I used to teach high school math. There was a big push for doing everything digitally. And admittedly, for some topics the use of technology in the classroom or at home can really be a benefit, for instance visualizations or interactive exercises. But having a digital device in class was the number one cause of distraction every time.

For a lot of things, good old blackboards are just fine as are pen + paper exercises. Maybe even for most high school math. That was frowned upon though by the higher ranks. If I was evaluated as a teacher and didn't include some iPad shenanigans in the class that I was getting audited for, I would have been in trouble. How behind the times!

I got along really well with most of my teenage students, it was a lot of fun interacting with them. But the politics behind it all got too annoying. Also, you're under very tight control on what you teach and how, that was super annoying. So I stopped teaching a few years ago and never looked back.

>“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,” they warned.

i dont understand why the teachers would go out of their way to reteach middle-school math.

i teach. my courses have prerequisites. if a student somehow makes it into my class without a passing-grade grasp of the prerequisites, i will point them in the right direction to get caught up, but i am not spending any class time on it. its not fair to the other students.

"The surge in math deficiencies after dropping the SAT highlights a systemic issue: grade inflation. Without a standardized baseline like the SAT/ACT, a 4.0 GPA from a high school with relaxed standards looks identical to a 4.0 from a highly rigorous one.

Paradoxically, removing test requirements harms underprivileged students the most. Preparing for the SAT requires a book and an internet connection. In contrast, building a competitive profile based entirely on expensive extracurriculars, sports, and elite summer camps is far more wealth-dependent. Standardized testing isn't perfect, but it's often the only objective equalizer we have."

Looking at the world, it seems we all go through similar systemic issues. Naturally, in East Asian cultures where the fervor for education is overheated, this phenomenon tended to manifest much earlier.

When specific exams are abolished or watered down under the banner of 'diversity and equal opportunity,' the wealthy actually gain a massive advantage. Of course, the exam system itself inherently favors the rich as well.

The reason is simple: weakening exams naturally forces the strengthening of alternative metrics. During the transition period when a new system is introduced to society, wealthy parents are far better equipped to adapt than poorer ones.

Korea’s 'Spoon Class Theory' (where rich parents are gold spoons and poor parents are dirt spoons) and Japan’s 'Parent Gacha' (parent lottery) stem from this exact dynamic.

Sure, standardized testing benefits the wealthy because they can hire top-tier tutors. However, when the rules of the system change entirely, the underprivileged simply do not have the buffer or resources to keep up with the shift.

Is this really surprising to anyone? Especially the oldies?

I remember decades ago when I started high school. We were all given laptops, but the teachers had a whole lecture on when to use laptops and for what.

One thing that stuck with me was how one of the teachers pointed out that we should still take notes and do our homework on physical notebooks, this is because we learn better that way. Things stick to our memory much more when we write it with our hand compared to writing it on the computer.

We were supposed to use electronics as little as possible until we grasp the subject. Pen and paper is enough in the beginning.

We have truly entered a era where electronic devices is part of our daily life, its now a necessity to have it on us at all times. Of all the places, I would have expected schools to be sensitive towards whats allowed in class and whatnot.

If I could decide, I would have banned all electronic devices in class (there is exceptions of course).

MIT dropped the SAT requirement only to bring it back a few years ago: https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/we-are-reinstating-our....

Dropping standardized test requirements is disconcerting. Of all of the institutions that should be making decisions neutrally based on the evidence, it’s universities. The fact that even institutions like MIT changed their admissions policies according to ideas that aren’t backed by evidence.

As a product of the STEM post-SAT UC system (UCLA ‘26), I never personally experienced “middle school math” being taught or a lack of mathematical understanding.

I’ve had my fair share of classes which throw you into the deep end and not many which coddle you. Never seen any professor teaching middle school mathematics. A lot of professors started off with a vague idea of prerequisites, covered the basic ideas and usually go straight into the deep end with new material. It is up to the student to make sure they are acquainted with the prerequisites, go to discussions or office hours to ask TAs or the professor, or just drop the class and do it next quarter (without penalty). At least in my four years at UCLA, we have ample opportunity to do it and the TAs are 90% empathetic towards “stupid questions.”

So in my personal opinion, I think profs shouldn’t be wasting time teaching basic math and there are more than enough opportunities for the student to learn it at their time in the UC.

Why do we have such an easy time accepting peoples intrinsic athletic ability and such a difficult time accepting people's intrinsic mental ability?

To me this is a 1:1 comparison, but people lose their mind when I make the comparison. College isn't for everyone just like amateur league sport isn't for everyone.

I feel like I am going to a minor league baseball game and seeing a shortstop on the field with the motor control of a toddler, and while everyone is cheering them, I think I'm taking crazy pills wondering who the hell steered this guy towards baseball his whole life.

Years ago, students would take placement exams when they enrolled in the community college. This was great for their education. They would spend a year or two getting to college level english and math.

That program is expensive and apparently made people “feel bad”. The colleges were no longer allowed to require placement tests. Then they were no longer allowed to offer remedial courses (courses that did not count toward a degree) and students went directly into college english and math.

The failure rates are astounding. About 1 in 3 at a large CC.

This issue is trickling up from k-12 being required to “pass” everyone to the colleges with that same pressure.

We need our policy to focus on education achievement rather than number-of-degrees. The incentive is short sighted and the ramifications could result in our local economies declining with ineffective employees, fewer successful businesses, etc.

My nephews came to the US in their early teens as non English speakers. They struggled in some of the courses but still got good grades reported to their parents. So, apparently some teachers will put them on a bus together with other minorities and take them on a day trip to the museum instead of math class, but they would still get graded. They retuned back to Spain and had a very difficult time graduating from high school because of math. So I’m not sure how well of a predictor high school is.

> "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,” they warned.

When I was a grad student in a mediocre university in a different state thirty years ago we had a lot of kids in a similar situation. This was resolved by means of a pre-placement exam, and the ones who scored the worst had to take one of two remedial math classes, the lower of which was solidly at the middle school level. The university had a SAT requirement at the time.

The pre-placement exam had two versions that were used on alternate days, and a student could take it as often as they liked.

This may be a new experience for those particular UC faculty, but it is not a new phenomenon.

Out of the current population of college students today, what percentage shouldn't really be there, be it for lack of intelligence or too much? (e.g. smart ceo guy dropping out.) 10%? 20%? 50%? If you can't do high school level math, much less middle school, do you deserve to be in college? It really strikes at what the purpose of college is: is it for educating people, no matter their prior abilities? Or is it to foster our best and brightest to put them on a path towards advancing society? Or is it to create well-rounded individuals, knowledgeable in many different domains? I admit, perhaps the purpose is all of the above, but if so, things that try to be everything for everyone often have to make sacrifices in one area to improve another.

We need to ensure a diverse student body - by making sure that smart kids of every race, class, and culture are given a thorough math education.

The K-12 public schools in California fail too many kids; and far too many poor, minority kids. Rather than fix this, we ban 8th grade algebra because we don't like the racial makeup of the advanced math track.

We can, in fact, have it both ways. But it will take change and be resisted by people who, ironically, claim to be helping the poor minorities most hurt today.

It's weird to me that standardized tests were demonized as anti-equity rather than GPA. You can always get extra help with homework, projects, etc. if you have a better funded support system. Single subject/unit tests in high school are also much more narrow in scope and easier to prepare for. A standardized test on the other hand is so wide in breadth that raw abilities will shine more.

> 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

I was annoyed to not find specifics. I would be surprised if the K12 school board and university STEM professors are in agreement about what middle school mathematics is.

Trig comes to mind as a common stumbling block. I could be forgetting, but I don't recall much of it on the SAT. If I had to pick one area of math where the gap between learning something initially and actually being shown its broader applicability is the longest, it would be that. Like a decade between SOHCAHTOA and diffeq / fourier probably.

It's very astonishing that sometime I heard folks with very high SAT including math /science/programming accolades failed to get admission in UCs but you have severe math deficit like this.

>Critics call the SAT inequitable and say high school grades are a good predictor of college success.

Well .. is it? We have decades of data that should either prove or disprove this. Why is this even an argument? There is an underlying, easily-veriable, objective reality.

Web site built for the petition campaign:

https://ucstudentsuccess.org/

Direct link to its FAQ page:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dxdfw0gIE2UW9k5cqtf6FVMaclI...

And here's the slick 50-page, double-column manifesto from the UC establishment, unsigned of course, on the subject -- giving us a sense of the scale of the bureaucratic blob that the petitioners are up against:

https://www.ucop.edu/institutional-research-academic-plannin...

something that came to my mind as I was reading the comments here -- the thing is that in the quest for professionalism, we have sidelined a lot of people who would be good at teaching in favor of people who are good at jumping hoops. there is a famous quote saying "when the measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure"

The open letter from UC faculty is here.

https://ucstudentsuccess.org/

Anecdotal data point: My son is finishing 9th grade, and he's taking 10th grade math because he got ahead a year when he was younger. At his school, you're exempted from having to take the final exam if you're passing with a reasonable grade at the end of the semester. He said there are about four students who don't have to take the final exam.

Math has always been hard to teach well, because issues with earlier math classes compound so much. With all the societal interruptions to education, and the impact of addictive tech on young people's minds, it's only gotten more difficult.

>Critics call the SAT inequitable and say high school grades are a good predictor of college success.

I mean, it seems pretty clear from the last 6 years of experience by professors and others that grades (or at least grades in isolation) aren't a good predictor at all for this. The problem is removing the use of standardized tests here was done for ideological reasons. You can already tell by the use of the word "inequitable" here, because a certain insane subset of policymakers and the public believe that we should push for equal outcomes ("equity") over equal opportunity (usually referred to as simply "equality").

The lack of any subject level standardised US high school certification to prove skill-level for matriculation still boggles my mind. I realise this is fundamentally a curriculum issue, as it’s set at a local level. There’s AP, but that’s not universally available.

I don’t support this “equity” agenda which can never work other than pulling everyone down to the lowest denominator. That said I also have a problem with “meritocracy” that I notice a lot of Asians these days keep constantly touting.

“Meritocracy” at best seems to mean, have a race and gender neutral set of rules, and then follow those rules rigorously. I think it is often tied to admission by test scores, which is I suppose in some sense race neutral. I think this is a horrible idea. Selecting for good test takers even in fields like Maths, Physics does not select for good potential Mathematicians, Physicists etc.

An even worse consequence is test scores is blind to physical fitness and fitness determines so much more about your quality of life than test scores. It is very hard to live a happy and fulfilling life obese, but it’s very easy to do so without a perfect SAT. I would rather, colleges focus on some amount of physical fitness at least to encourage fitness among the populace. But beyond that, in most careers your social skills and social intelligence is paramount, even that is completely ignored by test scores. What sort of “meritocracy” is then admission by test scores.

“Meritocracy” then seems to be the benefit of only a certain kind of person, a conscientious striver or a good test taker who tends to be bad at everything else. People who vouch for it tend to like the current status quo.

Let us say a billionaires son, born to immense wealth and connections, is probably going to have a larger impact to society just by fortune of his birth, by “meritocracy” he is denied admission into college. In this way, meritocracy is not dissimilar to equity, a leveling of the playing field, bring down everyone to the level of writing tests, the “equity” advocates want to create a system that eliminates racial differences, the “meritocracy” advocates want to create a system that eliminates fortune of birth, they just want a different system that often benefits them.

If colleges were optimizing for maximal impact to society and the world, its student body would look radically different than what it is now. There would still be one of math geniuses but there would be a lot fewer perfect SAT scorers, who never end up having much impact on society anyway. They would be far more children born to wealth, connections, but also more social butterflies who can fit into any group. Just some food for thought ;) not saying I agree with the picture I’m painting here. I just find the meritocracy argument self serving and annoying.

What did they expect to happen? Is it one of those things when they say "They may be a professor but they can't tie their shoes!". Surely, they should have seen it coming.

I see quotes from faculty there about this being "unexpected", like "the bottom dropped out". Are they just pretending to be surprised or actually surprised...

Community College is the way to go for most students. The UCs cost too much, for the first 2 years you can either spend 2400$ at a community college or 32k at a UC.

Even if your family has the money, put that extra 30k in an index and you have a home down payment by the time you finish school.

>Board members cited concerns the tests were biased against students of color and those from lower-income families — including students who did not have access to prep courses.

Ehh, you can't balance the world so easily. I was never going to go straight to a 4 year college because I didn't have a stable home situation.

There is a nother factor worth mentioning in the admissions piece - the proababilistic accuracy in admissions alongside massive increases in the number of applications students send out. The first admissions criteria is basically the ability to succeed at the institution academically. It used to be typically applied to a handful, maybe 10 max, universities. Now it is not uncommon to hear from students they applied to 40 or 50. In 2017, my university got 31k applications and accepted 7.4k students. In 2025 those numbers were 68k and 8.5k - the number of acceptances were up 20%, the applications were up 115%. If you assume admissions process has a 95% accuracy, that predicts a huge increase in 'false positives' dropping from 85% of students we expect to be 'correctly' prepared to 74%.

Add to that that the quality of math learning outcomes and math learning in K-12 has gone WAY down. I point this squarely at 2 factors - No child left behind and the rejection of the common core because parents no lnoger felthtey understood the math their kids were learning. (and teachers did not understand math well enough to teach it well as a conceptual matter).

Even if they are getting the grades and even getting the test scores, they increasingly undersstand very little. They are not prepared for understnading they are prepared for question answering. Even in advnaced classes I see students actively reject learning and understanding for just answering - answering is the point they have learned. Right answers are the point, the only point.

A colleague and I were recently talking about what they see their middle nad high schoolers being taught in math classes. They termed it 'calculation as a defense against analysis'

SATs might help some but they aren't the problem they are a stop gap. K-12 (and by extension college) have so heavily sought to (poorly) quantify every aspect of experience to evalute people that they have stripped any meaning from the process. The problem is nothing has useful predictive value anymore in a process that is oversaturated by a 115% increase in the number of decisions an admissions office has to make. Its a math problem more than a cultural or standards problem.

First make SAT/ACT free. Then we will talk about it.

I think there's conflating of problems here (at for the moment let's talk about primary school K-12 rather than university level).

There is a fundamental problem with a good percentage of public schools right now, where the previous expectations of child behavior, learning ability, and classroom teaching outcome has been broken. And instead of coming up with ways to fix that, lots of people are trying to patch the holes at the output side.

Unfortunately, public schools have to serve everyone, including:

-- kids who have learning disabilities, which seems to be disturbingly an increasing fraction of the population, which costs lots and lots of extra money to pay for

-- kids who don't behave properly in school, which is a degradation of the expectations and frankly, reflection of the standards of families at home

-- "phone-it-in"ism of unfortunately a large enough portion of public school teachers, who are a combination of not the best trained, and honestly, not allowed to enforce discipline any more due to "equity" and liability rules that govern this now.

And instead of being able to fix these problems, concerned people try to look at the easier thing to "fix" which is to rig the outcome to "look right". Until it blatantly and obviously fails. And disserves a generation of kids in the meantime with their hypothesis about how it was going to work.

That's why you have dumbing down of entrance standards, as well as avoiding standardized tests (whether for the claimed reason of being "inequitable" or the worse lazy reason of "it's so stressful for the kids").

In the meantime, those with the means take their kids out of public school because no parent wants to conduct the experiment on their own kid.

And you then watch as our society generally falls behind other countries that are not yet so rich that they can afford to have kids failing and still somehow end up somewhat ok in life.

It’s ok. In the future, no one will do math. Mathematicians will be directors, with a team of math bots that they administer and direct. Instead of being managed, they will become the managers of mathematic autonomons. Universities need to get with the program.

/s