{"id":373530,"date":"2025-11-12T09:56:11","date_gmt":"2025-11-12T09:56:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/373530\/"},"modified":"2025-11-12T09:56:11","modified_gmt":"2025-11-12T09:56:11","slug":"uc-san-diego-sees-students-math-skills-plummet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/373530\/","title":{"rendered":"UC San Diego Sees Students\u2019 Math Skills Plummet"},"content":{"rendered":"

Other UCs are tracking similar trends, but UC San Diego\u2019s problem is \u201csignificantly worse,\u201d the report states.<\/p>\n

Laser1987\/iStock\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

The number of first-year students at the University of California, San Diego, whose math skills fall below a middle school level has increased nearly 30-fold over the past five years, according to a new report from the university\u2019s Senate\u2013Administration Working Group on Admissions<\/a>. In the 2025 fall cohort, one in eight students placed into math below a middle school level, despite having a solid math GPA.<\/p>\n

The number of first-year students in remedial math courses at the university surged to 390 in fall 2022, up from 32 students in fall 2020. The remedial math course was designed in 2016 and only addressed missing high school math knowledge, but instructors quickly realized that many of their students had knowledge gaps that went back to middle or elementary school, the report states. For fall 2024, UC San Diego revamped its remedial math course to address middle school math gaps and introduced an additional remedial course to cover high school math. In fall 2025, 921 students enrolled in one of these two courses\u201411.8\u00a0percent of the incoming class.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis deterioration coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects on education, the elimination of standardized testing, grade inflation, and the expansion of admissions from under-resourced high schools,\u201d the report states. \u201cThe combination of these factors has produced an incoming class increasingly unprepared for the quantitative and analytical rigor expected at UC San Diego.\u201d<\/p>\n

Within the UC <\/strong>system, the San Diego campus isn\u2019t alone, but its problem is \u201csignificantly worse,\u201d the report states. This is partly because the university has, since 2022, admitted and enrolled more students from low-income schools that saw greater COVID-era learning loss than other UC campuses. Many other UC campuses are seeing similar, though smaller, declines in student preparation. About half of UC campus math chairs responded to a survey saying that the \u201cnumber of first-year students that are unable to start in college-level precalculus\u201d increased twofold between fall 2020 and fall 2025, and the other half said the number increased threefold.\u00a0<\/p>\n

High school grade inflation is not helping the university evaluate students\u2019 math skills, the report states. In 2024, the average high school math GPA for students in Math 2, the middle school\u2013level remedial math course, was 3.65\u2014an A-minus.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt the same time our admit pool is slipping in math preparation, we see a slight improvement in their math grades from high school,\u201d the report states. \u201cThe elimination of standardized testing together with COVID resulted in a mismatch between students\u2019 course level\/grades and their actual levels of preparation, with far-reaching implications for determining math readiness and course placement.\u201d<\/p>\n

The working group put forward a number of recommendations for addressing these shortcomings, including using a \u201cmath index\u201d based on historical placement data and transcript-based variables to \u201cpredict students\u2019 likelihood of placement into remedial math.\u201d The group also recommended establishing feedback mechanisms with high schools and requiring math placement testing by June\u00a01 for incoming students, among other things.<\/p>\n

\"subscribe\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Other UCs are tracking similar trends, but UC San Diego\u2019s problem is \u201csignificantly worse,\u201d the report states. Laser1987\/iStock\/Getty…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":373531,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5134],"tags":[5229,1582,276,2563,407,2879,2878,420,50,3549,7264,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-373530","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-diego","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-california","11":"tag-career","12":"tag-education","13":"tag-events","14":"tag-higher","15":"tag-jobs","16":"tag-news","17":"tag-san-diego","18":"tag-sandiego","19":"tag-united-states","20":"tag-united-states-of-america","21":"tag-unitedstates","22":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","23":"tag-us","24":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115536133238031558","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373530","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=373530"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373530\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/373531"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=373530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=373530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=373530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}