Diego sported a shiny blue Cal jacket and beamed with Berkeley pride as I interviewed him for the Fiat Lux Scholarship, the top award for low-income, high-achieving students admitted to the University of California (UC), Berkeley. He was one of the finalists. Diego grew up in a one-bedroom apartment with his parents and his sister—his father worked as a gardener and his mother was a factory worker; their family income was below $35,000. Diego’s dream was to pursue a degree and career in mechanical engineering, designing better agricultural machinery for farmers like his grandfather. By all the measures available to him, he had done everything right.
He took nearly every advanced class his high school offered and earned stellar grades, including an A in AP Calculus AB as an 11th grader. He seemed like the kind of student targeted by Governor Gavin Newsom’s Higher Education Compact: a multibillion-dollar agreement pressuring the UC system to close racial and socioeconomic gaps in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) by admitting students like Diego into premier programs. But Diego also scored a 1 out of 5 on his AP Calculus exam. That’s why he was exactly the kind of student the Compact is likely to fail.
What does an A grade in AP Calculus mean when it is paired with a score of 1 on the national exam? Exactly what a recent UC San Diego report revealed: In too many public schools, grades have become completely decoupled from learning.
None of this was Diego’s fault. But now, he would face the reality of a world-class university. He would be required to retake calculus at Berkeley before moving on to the grueling upper-division requirements of mechanical engineering. With his immense drive and determination, common sense says he would catch up. Right?
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“Today, the more successful a public high school is at preparing its students, the lower its graduates’ chances of getting into top UC campuses like Berkeley and San Diego.”
Berkeley admitted 45% of applicants from a high school where nearly 94% of “students failed to meet the state standards in mathematics.”
It admitted less than 14% of applicants from a school where “nearly 100 percent of its students in AP Calculus BC pass the national exam with a perfect score of 5.”