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The Atrocious Numbers, The Awful Truth
The University of California at San Diego didn’t release its latest math-readiness report with much fanfare — and after reading it, you understand why. A joint Academic Senate and administrative working group found a steep decline in readiness over the last five years. The number of students testing below middle-school math levels increased nearly 30-fold since 2020, and these students now make up roughly 1 in 8 incoming first-year students.
The details get worse. UCSD gives a diagnostic assessment to “Math 2” students — the group placed in the university’s lowest remedial class because their skills fall at the elementary or middle school level. In this cohort, students struggled with basic arithmetic, simple integer addition, and even rounding. Roughly 25% missed a first-grade level number-balance question, 61% failed to round 374,518 to the nearest hundred, and fewer than one in five could solve an eighth-grade problem.
These aren’t students returning to college after years away. These are first-year students arriving straight from California high schools.
A Broken Pipeline Long Before Students Reach UCSD
The report exposes a systemwide failure years before UCSD ever sees these students. Despite taking the state’s complete high-school sequence — Algebra I, Geometry, Algebra II, and often Precalculus or Calculus — many of these students earned A-level grades while never mastering the basics those courses require. UCSD’s faculty describe a widening “mismatch between high-school transcripts and actual preparedness.”
In any rational admissions system, competency is verified before admission, not after. But with standardized tests eliminated and grades increasingly inflated, UCSD now conducts the first honest academic measurement these students have seen in years. The result is upside-down: students are admitted on the strength of transcripts that do not reflect actual skill, and only afterward does the university discover gaps at the elementary-school level.
Once enrolled, these students must step backward into Math 2 or Math 3B — courses designed to reteach Grades 1–8 and Grades 9–11 math. These classes slow degree progress, consume financial aid, and undermine confidence long before students ever attempt actual college-level work.
A K–12 System Where Accountability Goes to Die
If California’s K–12 system had meaningful accountability, UCSD’s findings would trigger immediate statewide action. How does a student pass Algebra II while struggling with elementary math?
Because the system rewards promotion over mastery.
Teachers are rarely (like never) evaluated on whether students actually learn the material. State laws put into place by the California Teachers Association (CTA) - who more or less have “purchased” the state legislature, make consequences nearly impossible to enforce. And grading practices in have moved dramatically away from using objective testing as the primary consideration. In several large California districts, “equitable grading” now includes minimum scores of 50%, removal of deadlines from academic grades, and generous retake policies. Grades increasingly reflect effort, or even sympathy, rather than competency.
UCSD’s findings aren’t surprising — they’re inevitable.
The SAT Problem Isn’t the Problem — It’s the Symptom
Eliminating the SAT and ACT forced UC campuses to rely heavily on high school GPAs at precisely the moment GPAs became least reliable. UCSD’s report makes the point bluntly: standardized tests didn’t cause this crisis — they used to expose it. Without objective measurement, California is flying blind.
UCSD now urges UC leadership to examine enormous grading disparities between schools and to consider a systemwide re-evaluation of standardized testing. When faculty at an elite campus suggest revisiting the SAT, it’s not nostalgia. It’s a necessity. They can no longer trust the academic signals coming from California high schools.
Students Are Paying the Price for Adult Failures
The students in these remedial courses aren’t at fault. They are paying the price — in time, money, and lost confidence.
For years, they were told they were “on track.” They earned A’s in advanced courses. They walked across stages and were celebrated as “college-ready.” Only when they arrived at UCSD did anyone tell them the truth: they had been promoted without the skills those grades implied.
Remedial math delays graduation, drains financial aid, and disproportionately harms the very students California claims to uplift. There is nothing equitable about discovering — only after enrolling in a UC campus — that you were never actually prepared.
When a system inflates grades and lowers expectations, the harm always falls heaviest on those with the least support.
So, Does It Matter?
It matters because UC San Diego’s report reveals a K–12 system increasingly hostile to rigor, accountability, and honest evaluation. If high-school grades can’t be trusted — and UCSD’s data shows they can’t — then students will continue to arrive underprepared, frustrated, and misled. Faculty are sounding an alarm that the state has ignored: no serious education system can function without objective measures.
The solutions aren’t complicated. They require accountability — real evaluation, meaningful consequences, and transparency when students aren’t learning. But these reforms have been blocked for decades by the California Teachers Association, one of the most potent and best-funded political forces in the state. CTA routinely spends tens of millions each election cycle to preserve the status quo. When a special interest shapes education policy so effectively, it becomes difficult to imagine good public policy outmuscling political muscle.
The students may be failing. But the system producing their failures is performing exactly as designed.
My friend Dean Andal, a former member of the State Board of Equalization, and a UCSD alumnus, actually tipped me off to this study. I will end this column with his cogent, sobering observation, and call for action:
“Unqualifed students fail because they are not prepared, qualified students don’t get a scarce seat at the opportunity table, and many California high schools continue to produce unqualified candidates with grade inflated transcripts,” said Andal. He went on to say, “The UCSD leadership should be ashamed of this scandal, Chancellor Khosla should resign.”
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