Comment by zdragnar
4 hours ago
Do they not have remedial classes for these students? It's been more than 20 years, but back in my day, if you weren't ready for entry level classes (but still got in to university) you took remedial classes first.
4 hours ago
Do they not have remedial classes for these students? It's been more than 20 years, but back in my day, if you weren't ready for entry level classes (but still got in to university) you took remedial classes first.
The processes for delivering remedial classes no longer work at the scale required. UC San Diego published a detailed report of what's happening at their campus (https://senate.ucsd.edu/media/740347/sawg-report-on-admissio...): their remedial math placement grew from 32 students in 2020 to 921 students in 2025, 665 of whom placed into an extra-remedial course covering grade 1-8 math which had not previously been needed.
The system is working as designed. If they don’t want to provide remedial then they need some pre-admission test to weed them out. The students can try again later after maturing more or taking community college classes.
Right? That's what the source article is about, the UC faculty would like to resume using the SAT and ACT as pre-admissions tests.
1 reply →
> 32 students in 2020 to 921 students in 2025
Seems easy to explain, high schoolers were not in school from 2020-2022 in most areas, so they were two or three years behind in everything when they got to college.
Is there a shortage of students who have a grasp of elementary school math, who apply to UC?
Instead of admitting the captain of the ping-pong team (who can't count past 21 - or past ten without pulling off his boots), maybe admit any one of the students who... Did not have the extracurricular pedigree, but actually applied themselves and passed Math 12?
Surely, there's more than a few hundred of the latter in California.
You're misunderstanding the problem. It's not that the UCs are admitting a bunch of special exceptions who failed out of high school math; these are people who got decent grades and are supposed to know the material.