UC Berkeley Calculus Professor Claims Some of Her Students Can’t Do Middle School Math
“Office hours that should be spent discussing integrals instead become lessons on fractions and basic algebra you would expect students to learn in middle school.”
A calculus professor at UC Berkeley is sounding the alarm about the inability of many of her students to even do middle school-level math.
Some of this can be attributed to learning losses during the pandemic, but not all of it. This is a serious problem.
The professor, Zvezdelina Stankova, wrote this for the San Francisco Standard:
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.
Seen side by side, their outcomes don’t make sense. They make perfect sense only if you imagine admissions working less like careful evaluation and more like chance.
I don’t use that comparison lightly.
I teach mathematics at UC Berkeley. Three days a week, I stand in front of lecture halls with 500 to 1,400 students. By the second week of the semester, I already know who is in trouble. Some students are five to eight years behind in mathematics. Office hours that should be spent discussing integrals instead become lessons on fractions and basic algebra you would expect students to learn in middle school.
That is why this spring and summer, thousands of faculty members across all 10 UC campuses — including more than two-thirds of UC’s mathematics faculty — signed open letters(opens in new tab) urging the system to restore the SAT and ACT in admissions. Five Nobel laureates joined us, along with professors from across the university, including Beatriz Manz, Berkeley’s first Latina full professor.
We did so because what an admission letter is supposed to mean — that a student is ready to attend the school — no longer matches what we see in our classrooms.
This follow-up report from the New York Post may explain part of the problem:
SF high school where 94% flunk math has California’s highest Berkeley acceptance rate
A San Francisco high school where students get top grades simply for showing up now has the highest acceptance rate in the state to the prestigious University of California, Berkeley — as critics blame rampant grade inflation and rock-bottom standards for a surge in ill-prepared college students who end up dropping out.
Mission High School had a 45% acceptance rate into the elite university, with 34 out of its 76 applicants gaining admission last fall, far ahead of the state average of 15%, according to data compiled by the San Francisco Chronicle.
But it’s not because of superior academics, critics say, but rather because of low standards and a lefty policy that eliminated SAT testing requirements in the University of California system, sending a flood of students who can barely do fractions into demanding courses like Calculus.
“Grades were sometimes too easy to earn,” Levi Lum of Mission High told the San Francisco Standard.
“In many required classes, attendance and basic completion could be enough to receive a grade that would ordinarily signal strong proficiency.”
This is a genuine scandal.
Who benefits from any of this, besides the school that gets all of the tuition dollars? It’s certainly not the students.
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Comments
That’s nothing, a lot of my professors couldn’t do middle school math, or exercise basic logic.
That said, K-12 is broken abominably, and higher ed needs to be flushed of a lot of dead weight. Most people don’t need university degrees, and the taxpayer shouldn’t be on the hook for any of it.
People like American Federation of Teachers (union) leader Randi Weingarten need to be confronted with this sort of information.
Our public schools really are in disastrous shape from an academics standpoint. The teachers and any other people involved with the creation of the curricula are to blame.
Randi doesn’t handle student problems — only teacher problems.
That grifting c*nt troll should be swinging by the neck.
“A calculus professor at UC Berkeley sounding alarm about inability of many of her students to even do middle school-level math.”
Since they’re already in the pipeline, the only solution now is to lower the requirements for Med school.
Keep rollin’, rollin’, rollin’
Though the streams are swollen
Keep them dogies rollin’, rawhide
Head ’em up, Move’ em out
Rawhide
“My heart’s calculatin’ BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRP!”
100% sure these flunkers can tell you all about intersectionality and colonialist oppression and the ‘genocide’ in Gaza and the evils of capitalism and white supremacy, right wing mass violence and Orange Man Bad.
They could probably calculate the value of reparations to the nearest decimal point.
if I didn’t understand fractions and basic algebra, I probably wouldn’t sign up for a calculus course. And if I had to take the course, the last thing I would ever do is approach the professor after hours and admit my ignorance. What the @#$? just watch a YouTube video. It ain’t that difficult. Neither is calculus for that matter.
I don’t see the problem. It’s what ‘F’s are for.
The schools now will not give Fs. They just passed them on.
JDei–MDei–PHDei
Nancy Pelosi, second in the succession line to the presidency, didn’t know the difference between a billion and a trillion. But, she knew both were pretty darn big, and in the words of Hillary Clinton, “At this point what difference does it make?”
As always, you cannot not expect universities to care about the quality of the education they offer, because morons pay tuition just like everyone else. They certainly pay room and board.
Once the ‘tards graduate (they will) and enter the workforce your college degree won’t be worth toilet paper. God help you if they go on for a masters program.
I will tell my kids to learn practical skills and perhaps consider a degree later in life. But as it stands? I couldn’t possibly recommend taking on all that debt for literally nothing except a shabby pseudo hotel for teenagers to fornicate in. Absolutely disgraceful
Colleges and Universities today really only care about the person paying the money for the degree. The government is coming after people for Student Loans so people are waking up to costs. The issue that is waking Colleges up is that they are not getting the students in for long periods, plus they are not getting the people for the massive useless degrees.
Math is currently unfashionable. Teaching math by getting students to do the work of memorization and iterative testing seems to be almost impossible in public schools.
The Feds should just rule that the SAT must be used at schools that receive public funds. Used to screen, and used to assign the education track. The Feds should not be paying for college to teach fractions, which was 3rd grade math back in the 1970s.
Or better yet…remind me again where education is an enumerated power in the Constitution
Me and my wife went to college in the early 70s. We saw the education system problems with our sons in the 90s and early 2000s. Our sons graduated HS different years after we tutored them to get them properly taught though school.
An example of the problems in HS with math was my youngest was taking Algebra and having problems. I looked at the book, the way the teacher gave the problems, and it made no sense. I am an Electrical Engineer and have finished all math possible.
I went with my son to the teacher and talked to her. I said the way that the book and she was teaching could be better. She said what made me think I knew anything about math and I told her what I did. I explained I could show my son ways to do the problems easier and he would show the work. She agreed if the work was shown. I showed my son how to do the problems and he found them simple. He then used how I showed him how to do the math and did the various problems showing the work. The teacher failed him for not following the exact method that the book showed.
This is what is happening in the present US teaching system. how we were taught in the 50s and 60s with the books have been replaced with books that make teaching and learning bad. This is for all areas of learning.
“A San Francisco high school where students get top grades simply for showing up …”
What aren’t they telling us about this school? Are the students generally of a similar ethnicity by any chance?
As long as you identify as competent, Ibram’s yer uncle.
I think they did. The SF Standard story (quoted in the story) cited Mission High School in the context of a 45% acceptance rate at UCB. That was well above the average for all state high schools of 15%. The implication that I got was that Mission was the source of the professor’s example students.
I guess it would be heresy for that professor to advise the student to drop the Calc-I and pick up an algebra class at a local community college.
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