According to the Washington Post, reported on June 30 local time, due to the effects of the enrollment expansion reform, the quality of California University's student body 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 admissions decisions due to concerns about "injustice in standardized tests." This move was part of a recruitment reform experiment at the University of California, aimed at expanding enrollment and providing opportunities for first-generation college students, low-income individuals, and minority students to access science and engineering education.
Things have gone contrary to expectations. After the cancellation of standardized tests, the University of California’s admission process relies heavily on high school grades and personal essays. However, over the years, high school scores have often been inflated, and the widespread use of AI has made it difficult to accurately assess students' independent writing skills and logical reasoning abilities through essays. Without a unified and quantitative assessment standard, the reliability and transparency of the admission process decline, and it becomes easier to be influenced by human biases.
Six years have passed, and the negative impacts in classrooms are evident. According to statistics from the University of California, San Diego, the number of freshmen whose mathematical skills fall 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 Berkeley, for three consecutive years, two to three-quarters of freshman students had serious gaps in their basic knowledge during their introductory calculus courses.
Some students haven't even mastered fraction operations, yet they are required to learn complex and advanced concepts such as limits, derivatives, and Riemann integrals during the same semester. In today's Berkeley calculus classes, teachers are forced to pause midway and re-explain basic arithmetic operations like distributive law of multiplication and addition: (a+b)c = ac + bc. According to California curriculum standards, these concepts should be taught in third-grade elementary school.
The enrollment policy was intended to help certain groups, but in fact, these groups suffered the most. The policy concealed the students' fundamental weaknesses and shifted the problems to the university campus. As a result, students with weak foundations could not keep up with the curriculum progress and were trapped in a learning dilemma. Students with better foundations lost interest in attending classes due to the repetition of basic content.
Recently, more than 2,100 faculty members from the University of California’s science and engineering departments jointly issued a letter calling for the reinstitution of standardized exams in the admissions process. Subsequently, non-science and engineering faculty also issued a joint letter, with over 800 signatures in support.
