Mark Littlehale

So let me get this straight: – 1 in 12 incoming UCSD freshmen don’t know middle school math, – and the remedial math course was too advanced, – so UCSD had to create a remedial remedial math course, – and a quarter of the students placing into it had a perfect 4.0 GPA in their high school math courses. That sounds so ridiculous, like something you’d read in The Onion, but it’s unfortunately real. Here are some direct quotes from the UCSD report: “Between 2020 and 2025, the number of students whose math 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.” “While Math 2 was designed in 2016 to remediate missing high school math knowledge, now most students had knowledge gaps that went back much further, to middle and even elementary school. To address the large number of underprepared students, the Mathematics Department redesigned Math 2 for Fall 2024 to focus entirely on elementary and middle school Common Core math subjects (grades 1-8), and introduced a new course, Math 3B, so as to cover missing high-school common core math subjects (Algebra I, Geometry, Algebra II or Math I, II, III; grades 9-11).” “Few, if any, students who place into Math 2 have successfully completed an engineering degree.” “high school math grades are only very weakly linked to students’ actual math preparation.” “The correlation between the average math grade and the placement result is only around 0.25 on a scale of 0 to 1. In 2024, over 25% of the students in Math 2 had a math grade average of 4.0.” “In fact, for more than two decades the Mathematics Department has found that out of all available student data, the single best predictor for math placement has been the SAT (math section) score, with the ACT score being an equally good predictor.”