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im supposed to take the TSI soon if I want to go to college, but math is so hard. It’s been way over 11 years since I’ve even been in High School. I don’t remember shit, my mind is blank when I look at everything. I might just raw dog the math test and be placed in remedial math. I would need the best tutor in the world to teach me in less than 6 days if I was trying to aim higher
The reckoning is here. The UC San Diego report is a warning about the consequences of a decade of magical thinking in education policy and p
By: Robert Pondiscio
Published: Nov 12, 2025
When professors at one of the nation’s top public universities start warning that their students can’t do middle-school math or write a coherent paragraph, the rest of us should pay attention. A new faculty report from the University of California–San Diego describes a “steep decline in the academic preparation” of entering freshmen.
Between 2020 and 2025, the number of UCSD students whose math skills fall below middle-school level increased nearly thirtyfold—from under 1 percent to roughly one in eight. The university has been forced to redesign remedial math to cover elementary-school material and create an entirely new course to reteach high-school algebra and geometry.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but…what did you expect?
Every force in American education has been working toward this moment. Covid was catastrophic, but the rot began long before. The UCSD report attributes the collapse to “the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects on education, the elimination of standardized testing, grade inflation, and the expansion of admissions from under-resourced high schools.” That last phrase is a euphemism for low-income, minority youths whose interest K–12 education’s love affair with “equity” is intended to serve. But the report exposes how intellectually bankrupt that impulse has become—as if we can get students to and through an elite university by force of will and noble sentiment rather than the hard, cumulative work of academic preparation.
The University of California’s “test-blind” experiment has been a disaster. When UC’s Board of Regents eliminated the SAT and ACT in 2020, it left admissions officers relying almost entirely on high-school grades, which were functionally meaningless. Among students placed into Math 2, UCSD’s most remedial course, one in four had earned a perfect 4.0 in high-school math. Grades told admissions officers next to nothing about whether an applicant could actually do the work.
At the same time, UCSD dramatically expanded enrollment from schools covered by California’s Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF)—public schools where more than 75 percent of students are low-income, English learners, or foster youth. By 2024, a third of UCSD’s entering class came from LCFF schools—more than any other UC campus and roughly double the systemwide average. These students now make up more than half of those in remedial math courses, and in some years as much as 68 percent.
The UCSD faculty report is admirably blunt: “Admitting large numbers of underprepared students risks harming those students and straining limited instructional resources.” The professors who wrote this report deserve enormous credit for saying aloud what the broader education establishment will not: we are setting students up to fail.
And UC San Diego is hardly alone. Even Harvard University—the world’s most selective college—recently opened remedial math and writing classes. When Harvard must reteach algebra and composition, it tells you how deep the rot runs.
National Assessment of Educational Progress scores show reading and math achievement at their lowest levels in decades. The students now struggling in college were in middle school when classrooms shut down. Those who missed their foundational years—the ones who never mastered basic literacy or numeracy—are still in middle school today. The worst is yet to come.
Economist Eric Hanushek estimates that the learning loss suffered by this generation will cost the United States more than $90 trillion in future economic output—about six percent of GDP every year for the rest of the century. The average student will earn eight percent less in lifetime income than peers who graduated just a decade ago. This is not merely an educational failure; it is an economic calamity and a civic one.
But the deeper crisis is moral. We have persuaded ourselves that to pursue excellence is to perpetuate inequity, that holding students to high standards is unfair, that success can be achieved by adjusting expectations rather than meeting them. The UCSD report exposes the folly of that thinking. “Equity” without preparation is cruelty disguised as compassion. It delivers opportunity in name only, while denying students the knowledge and skills they need to thrive.
No one should take pleasure in UCSD’s predicament. The faculty are doing what they can—expanding tutoring, creating bridge programs, and building early interventions—but the scale of the problem dwarfs their capacity to fix it. As the report puts it, “our capacity is not limitless. We can only help so many students, and only when the gaps they need to overcome are within reach.” That is not an abdication of equity. It is an acknowledgment of reality.
The reckoning is here. The UC San Diego report is a warning about the consequences of a decade of magical thinking in education policy and practice. We replaced rigor with rhetoric, and the bill has come due.
I know this may not seem like much, but I just tested my knowledge against advanced high school math. And like, it's a free trial account, so it only gave me half a test. This is a pass on a half a test but I cried when I saw this because I thought I'd get zero of these answers right. So, so happy right now ❤️❤️❤️
@sfmcguire79: NEW: UC San Diego has released a new report documenting a “steep decline in the academic preparedness” of its freshmen. The nu
By: Steve McGuire
Published: Nov 11, 2025
NEW: UC San Diego has released a new report documenting a “steep decline in the academic preparedness” of its freshmen.
The number of entering students needing remedial math has exploded from 1/100 to 1/8.
They’ve had to create a second remedial class covering elementary and middle school math skills in addition to the one covering gaps from high school.
The report also shows that nearly 1/5 students fail to meeting entry level writing requirements.
“This deterioration coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects on education, the elimination of standardized testing, grade inflation, and the expansion of admissions from under-resourced high schools.”
The report focuses on the decline of math skills in particular.
They recently tested a group of their students.
Here are the percentages of students who correctly answered questions at each grade level:
As mentioned, they had to create a second remedial class.
They explain:
“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).”
This chart documents the increasing number of students placed in remedial math (math 2 and math 3b):
Why is this happening? One reason is pandemic learning loss:
Another reason is the elimination of standardized test requirements coupled with high school grade inflation:
As a major cause at UCSD in particular, they point to a significant increase in students admitted from “Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF)” schools, which are “California public schools in which more than 75 percent of the school's total enrollment is composed of students who are identified as either eligible for free or reduced-price meals, or English learners, or foster youth.”
Enrollment from these schools has increased system-wide and especially at UCSD:
“Table 6 shows that UC San Diego has had more than double the LCFF+ enrollment percentages compared to all other campuses during 2022-2024, except for UC Riverside (which still trails UC San Diego) and UC Merced (which leads UC San Diego by a few percentage points). The first panel of the table shows the entire first-year classes at each campus during 2022-2024, and the second panel shows the subset of first-year classes from California high schools. More than a third of enrolled first-year students at UC San Diego during 2022-2024 were admitted from LCFF+ schools, compared to well under 20% for all other UC campuses except UC Riverside and UC Merced.”
Students from these LCFF+ schools make up a large chunk of those students needing remedial classes:
This is a damning report of the state of admissions at UCSD.
The report makes clear that the situation is straining resources and making it difficult for the university to serve its mission and its students:
To be clear, this isn’t all UCSD’s fault, and it looks like the faculty have been doing what they can to address the issues but they can’t sustain it.
The math department and the report’s authors deserve a lot of credit for documenting the issues.
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There's an alarming number of Mathematics majors taking remedial math.
One additional element that must be factored into this is the emergence of "woke math" within the last 5 years, such as by complete nutjobs like Rochelle Gutierrez, Laurie Rubel and Shraddha Shirude.
I took some heat about this by pointing it out a few years ago and was told very firmly that it simply wasn't happening.
But, I told you so. This is what "equity" looks like.
Classes start tomorrow. Nervous for no reason. This term will be easy anyways.
Okay
I've been discouraged from asking this because someone had already agreed to help me with this but they ended up not doing squat ....Is there anyone who knows intermediate algebra or of any place to learn it good? This is my third time taking a remedial class in it and once again I'm at risk of failing it, which if I am I'll be removed from the school. I've been to tutoring and that can only help so much. My instructor only suggested for me to get disability help (because he thinks I'm handicapped from how dumb I am) and that's lead to nowhere. Khan Academy doesn't have all the videos and explanations I need to actually understand anything I spent my last summer crying on the floor in my room because my online math course was too difficult for me and I failed almost instantly So yeah, you can call this a handout or something but at least I'm doing this now
In-class notes on all kinds of *fun* stuff involving radicals
This week's in-class math notes :)
