In a report released earlier this month, UC San Diego sought to address what its Senate-Administration Workgroup on Admissions called “a steep decline in the academic preparation of its entering first-year students”. This decline, they write, “poses serious challenges both to student success and to the university’s instructional mission.” While writing and language were of some concern, it was math that drew particular attention.
Specifically, the share of students placed in UC San Diego’s remedial Math 2 course has grown at a rapid rate. In fall 2020, only 32 students (or 0.5% of the incoming freshman class) needed to enroll in Math 2. Two years later, that number had jumped to 390 students (6% of the incoming freshman class). This fall, 665 students are in Math 2 (8.5% of the incoming freshman class).
But it wasn’t just that dramatically more students needed the remedial math course. Students were also starting to arrive on campus with more deteriorated math skills. From the report:
Alarmingly, the instructors running the 2023-2024 Math 2 courses observed a marked change in the skill gaps compared to prior years. 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. (emphasis added)
As some examples of skills students missed, 25% were not able to correctly fill in the blank in the equation 7+2=?+6, a first-grade math skill. About one in five (21%) were not able to correctly answer the word problem Sarah had nine pennies and nine dimes. How many coins did she have in all?, a second-grade skill. Only 39% were able to correctly round the number 374518 to the nearest hundred, a third-grade math skill. Finally, barely a third (34%) were able to divide the fraction 13/16 by 2, a fifth-grade math skill. (For more examples of skills students missed, see page 49 of the report.)
UC San Diego joins Harvard in making headlines for needing a new course after having dropped standardized testing as an admissions requirement. They have also both needed a new remedial math course to help fill in the gaps in students’ foundational math skills left by the pandemic-related education disruptions. Data from the latest 12th grade National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) showed that 45% of 12th graders were below NAEP Basic in 2024, up from 40% in 2019. In the younger grades, nearly a quarter of 4th graders (24%) and 39% of eighth graders are also considered below NAEP Basic, meaning they lack certain essential elements of their foundational math knowledge.
Given the present state of math performance, it should not come as a surprise that more and more institutions, including schools like Harvard and UC San Diego, have found themselves needing to catch students up from an even earlier starting point.
