There has been an extremely steep five-year decline within the academic community of the University of California, San Diego since the worldwide outbreak of COVID-19, all the way up to recent times.
Paraphrasing the official UCSD report, a near 30-fold increase in lowered math skills for UCSD students has occurred between 2020 and 2025. In further summation, roughly one-eighth of the entire cohort of students was a part of this group.
This affects not only the mathematical concept of student learning, but also the occupational concept.
“Students lacking basic math skills face limited career opportunities in an increasingly technical job market. The situation affects college readiness across the board, not just at UC campuses,” stated the West Angeles branch of the Education and Enrichment Program, a program aimed to offer a “wide variety of extended learning opportunities to youth.”
Additionally, this cohort of students was placed in a Math 2 course, where algebra and geometry are covered before they arrive on campus.
As reported by the Senate Admission Workgroup of Admissions (SAWG), this “remedial math course” was designed to serve a very small number of students, specifically 100 students per year, or approximately 1%.
In Fall 2022, nearly 400 students were placed into this entry-level course and by Fall 2023, 500 were placed. This prompted the Mathematics Department of the school to scramble for additional instructors to cater to these students. But as more students took the courses, an obvious skill gap was there. Most students could not solve a single-digit addition problem or round a six-digit number.
“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,” the report stated.
Last year, in an effort to address the obvious problem of mathematically unprepared students, the university redesigned Math 2, but with a focus on middle school and elementary core problems and concepts (grades 1-8).
Students are approaching college with a low-level understanding of mathematical concepts. Further, the report stated that “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.”
At first glance, you would think that these students’ transcripts or past mathematical experiences would match the performance, but that could not be further from the truth.
According to the report: “At UC San Diego, in the fall of 2024, of those who demonstrated math skills not meeting middle school levels, only 6% met only the minimum high school course requirement, reporting Algebra II and Integrated III as their most advanced math courses (Table 2). The other 94% went beyond, with 42% percent completing Calculus or Precalculus and another 44% whose last recorded high school math course was a Statistics class.”
Now, where does standardized math testing come into play? In 2020, the University of California Board of Regents voted to eliminate the ACT and SAT from admissions consideration. This then resulted in more admissions to the university, since high school grades were the sole measure of approval.
“The major benefit of this is that there are inherent biases in standardized tests such as the ACT and SAT, so by removing the tests from the equation, you’re providing a more equitable admissions process,” says H-F’s Mathematics Department Lead, Brian Garland.
Garland additionally pointed out that more opportunities at colleges and universities are possible and open up doors for “very capable, creative students that may not perform well in high-stakes, timed test environments.”
“Now the downside is what we are seeing out of the University of California, San Diego, where you have an increase in the number of students needing to take non-credit-bearing math that addresses high school and even middle school math skills,” Garland counter-argued.
“Schools across the country have been lowering standards and removing penalties for failure. The results are coming into focus,” said Rose Horowitch, a staff writer for the Atlantic. Grade inflation takes the spotlight as outcomes branded on paper don’t quite match the real-life skillset.
