The question that captured the world’s attention was 7 + 2 = [_] + 6. There’s no trick; it’s as easy as it looks. The answer is 3.
The question was posed to students in the University of California San Diego’s (UCSD) fast-growing remedial math class, Math 2, and one-quarter of them got it wrong, according to a UCSD Senate-Administration Workgroup on Admissions report.
UCSD, one of the country’s best public universities, has offered remedial math for nearly a decade — but lately, the share of students requiring it has skyrocketed. In the fall of 2020, 32 students took Math 2. In the fall of 2025, fully 1,000 students had math placement scores so low they would need it.1
In fact, many of the students didn’t just need remedial high school math — their scores indicated they needed remedial middle school or even elementary school math. Only 39% of the students in the remedial class knew how to “round the number 374518 to the nearest hundred.”
Reviewing test results like these, you would expect transcripts full of Cs, Ds, or even failing grades. But alarmingly, these students’ transcripts did not even reflect profound struggles in math. Mostly, they were students whose transcripts said they had taken advanced math courses and performed well.
“Of those who demonstrated math skills not meeting middle school levels,” the report found, 42% reported completing calculus or precalculus. “The pattern of high school math classes taken in many cases suggests much higher levels of math skill than the actual math skill the student often has.”
The students were broadly receiving good grades, too: More than a quarter of the students needing remedial math had a 4.0 grade point average in math. The average was 3.7. In fact, the report found that on average, student grades in 2025 rose compared to those of students admitted in 2020.
Instead, here is the absurd image that the report slowly and painstakingly paints: A number of high schools are awarding A grades to AP Calculus students who do not have any calculus skills and who would get the lowest possible score on the AP Calculus exam if they took it.
Trying to understand how this happened, I talked to some high school math teachers.
“I have taught AP Calc in circumstances that produced this kind of result,” one public school high school math teacher told me. “No one can do fractions.”2
The students are missing so many prerequisites that teaching them calculus is basically hopeless. And indeed, almost all of them fail the AP Calculus exam at the end of the year.
———
2014: 21% of University of Wisconsin System Freshman Require Remedial Math
How One Woman Rewrote Math in Corvallis
Singapore Math
Discovery Math
Math Forum 2007