I Teach Calculus at Berkeley. Some of My Students Can’t Do Middle School Math

{snip}

I teach mathematics at UC Berkeley. Three days a week, I stand in front of lecture halls with 500 to 1,400 students. By the second week of the semester, I already know who is in trouble. Some students are five to eight years behind in mathematics. Office hours that should be spent discussing integrals instead become lessons on fractions and basic algebra you would expect students to learn in middle school.

That is why this spring and summer, thousands of faculty members across all 10 UC campuses — including more than two-thirds of UC’s mathematics faculty — signed open letters urging the system to restore the SAT and ACT in admissions. Five Nobel laureates joined us, along with professors from across the university, including Beatriz Manz, Berkeley’s first Latina full professor.

We did so because what an admission letter is supposed to mean — that a student is ready to attend the school — no longer matches what we see in our classrooms.

{snip}

In January 2020, a UC task force studied standardized testing and recommended keeping it. Then-President Janet Napolitano nevertheless urged the Board of Regents to phase out the SAT and ACT, citing pandemic disruptions and long-standing equity concerns. The regents voted that May to make testing optional, and a court ruling later that year, focused on access for students with disabilities, required UC to become completely test-blind through 2025.

Since then, admissions officers have been forbidden from considering the one standardized measure that provided a common academic benchmark across California’s thousands of high schools.

Many peer universities have since reconsidered. MIT, Stanford, Harvard, and Yale all suspended testing requirements during the pandemic. All have reinstated them. Across the Ivy League, similar reversals are underway.

UC has moved in the opposite direction.

Faculty asked the university to revisit the policy quickly, but the timeline has repeatedly slipped. The Academic Senate now plans a review that will conclude in June 2027, meaning no new admissions policy could take effect before fall 2028.

{snip}

Before 2020, Berkeley administered a diagnostic exam to incoming Calculus I students. Between 2018 and 2020, 71% of roughly 2,200 students tested as ready or nearly ready for calculus. At the bottom of the distribution there was almost nobody. Just 0.14% tested below basic algebra.

After UC adopted test-blind admissions, the picture changed dramatically.

Among approximately 2,800 Calculus I students tested between 2021 and 2023 with a different diagnostic that measured proficiency in eight mathematical topics, the share who were ready or nearly ready for calculus (meaning, they had proficiency in five to eight subjects) fell to 51%, dropping to 44% by 2023. Most troubling, the bottom of the distribution exploded. Seventeen percent of students answered none of the eight diagnostic topics correctly. By 2022-23, more than one-third had severe math deficits, and the single most common score on the exam was zero.

{snip}

Before 2020, most students clustered toward the “ready” end of the spectrum, with only a tiny tail at the bottom. Afterward, the middle hollowed out, and the weakest students became the largest single group. We didn’t end up with one somewhat weaker calculus class. We ended up teaching two different classes in one lecture hall: one for students who were prepared for college calculus and one for students who needed remedial mathematics that nobody had scheduled.

That distinction matters because it has been misunderstood publicly. An Aug. 12 article in the San Francisco Chronicle said that in the pre-2020 readiness assessment, 48% of students who took the exam were prepared for Calculus I. The article said the faculty reported higher readiness for students admitted under the test-blind policy. But that is incorrect. Our analysis defined calculus-readiness as students passing seven or eight out of eight topics on the diagnostic exam. By 2023, that figure had fallen to 26%. More important than any percentage is the distribution itself. The crisis isn’t simply that readiness declined; it’s that the middle collapsed while the bottom became the largest group in the room. The Chronicle didn’t mention that.

{snip}

Those of us teaching such courses don’t experience the consequences as abstractions. We watch students struggle through material they were expected to master years earlier. We pause lectures to reteach linear equations instead of expanding students’ understanding of differential equations.

The people arguing this test-blind policy on television, in committee meetings, and in politics do not stand in front of 700 students three times a week or grade a first midterm with a pre-curved D/F average.

{snip}