According to The Washington Post, reported on June 30 local time, due to the impact of the enrollment expansion reform, the quality of California University's student sources is rapidly declining. In the introductory calculus course for freshmen, many students at the University of California, Berkeley have serious gaps in their basic knowledge, forcing teachers to teach from the beginning of the third grade curriculum.
In the spring of 2020, the University of California Board of Regents suspended the inclusion of SAT and ACT scores in the admission process due to concerns about unfairness in standardized tests. This move was part of a pilot program to reform admissions at UC, aimed at increasing the number of students admitted, thereby providing opportunities for first-generation college students, low-income individuals, and minority students to access science and technology education.
Things have turned contrary to expectations. After the cancellation of standardized exams, the University of California's admission process relies heavily on high school grades and personal essays. However, over the years, high school grades have often been inflated, and the popularity of AI has made it difficult to accurately assess students' independent writing skills and logical reasoning abilities through essays. Without a unified quantitative assessment standard, the credibility and transparency of the admission process decrease, and it is also more susceptible to human biases.
Six years have passed, and the negative effects in classrooms are clearly evident. According to statistics from the University of California, San Diego, the number of freshmen whose math skills are below high school standards has increased by nearly 30 times over five years. Approximately one in twelve students have a foundation that is only at the junior high school level. At the University of Berkeley, for three consecutive years, two to three-quarters of the students in their first-year calculus courses had severely deficient foundational knowledge.
Some students haven't even mastered fraction operations, yet they have to learn complex and advanced concepts such as limits, derivatives, and Riemann integrals during the same semester. In today's calculus classes at Berkeley, teachers are forced to stop midway and re-explain basic arithmetic operations like the distributive law of multiplication: (a+b)c = ac + bc. According to California curriculum standards, this type of knowledge should be taught in the third grade of elementary school.
The enrollment policy was intended to help certain groups, but in reality, these groups suffered the most. The policy masked the students' underlying weaknesses, shifting the problem to university campuses. As a result, students with weak foundations could not keep up with the curriculum, falling into difficulties in learning. Meanwhile, students with better foundations lost interest in attending classes due to the repetition of simple content.
Recently, more than 2,100 faculty members from the University of California’s science and engineering departments signed a letter calling for the reinstitution of standardized exams during the admissions process. Subsequently, non-science and engineering teachers also signed a letter, with over 800 signatures in support.
