I teach calculus at Berkeley. Some of my students can’t do middle school math
In March, two California families opened college admissions decisions that should make anyone who cares about higher education stop and think.
One student — I’ll call him Elias — was admitted to a top University of California engineering program. His family was thrilled though surprised. Math had been his weakest subject in high school, but they assumed the university had seen something they hadn’t.
Another student — Nadia — watched rejection after rejection arrive from UC campuses. One turned her down even though she had earned A’s there in Calculus II and other college-level STEM courses through concurrent enrollment.
These are real students. I’ve changed their names, and withheld their schools, to protect their privacy.
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we seem to be running an interesting experiment as to what happens when you let thousands of seemingly completely unqualified students attend an elite university and hope that it just kinda works out, at least we’ll get some interesting papers out of this
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This 2009 (!) University of Wisconsin-Madison Placement Office study of “reform vs traditional math” outcomes came to mind when reading Corrinne Hess’s 7 July 2026 article: “Fewer than half of Wisconsin students are proficient at math“.
21% of University of Wisconsin System Freshman Require Remedial Math
How One Woman Rewrote Math in Corvallis
Singapore Math
Discovery Math
Math Forum 2007
