5 ms·

A Sad Collapse in Student Preparation at UC San Diego Was Inevitable

34 points by getnormality 11mo ago

tonetheman 11mo ago
I feel like this is nothing more than a side effect of what happened with Covid. Which would mean if we were willing to shut things down like we did we should be willing to take the secondary effects and solve those problems too.
- rogerrogerr 11mo ago
  The health establishment did not appear to think about children’s futures, only about making sure 86 year olds made it to 87.
  - piva00 11mo ago
    This is personally offending to me, I lost two friends in their 40s in Brazil when Bolsonaro acted like Trump, and didn't implement any federal policy to lower risks during the first year of the pandemic. Your take is stupid, that's how discourse goes now though, stupid hot takes from people who don't want to think, ponied up as some grand opinion while padded with derision and cynicism. It's just stupid... And quite tiresome, be better.
    - rogerrogerr 11mo ago
      I lost a relative because they wouldn’t let us in the hospital, waited too long to put in a stent while giving us the runaround over the phone, and caused lasting heart damage that took their life not long afterwards. We couldn’t advocate for them. My take is not stupid. I saw the damage shutdowns caused personally. It’s offensive to me that you call my lived experience a “stupid hot take”.
      - saltcured 11mo ago
        Not to diminish your loss, but this whole debate is mired in the difficulty in moving from individual outcomes to aggregates that matter for public health policy. Things got ugly (and will do so again in the future) facing something novel, where many basic assumptions we have about individual results are based on other baseline assumptions that are no longer true. The very expectation of a good surgical outcome for a common stent surgery is based on statistics from "normal" times. But, would the procedure have helped if the surgery was expected to cause COVID exposure, and the patient could have that severe respiratory illness during their surgical recovery? Would it be a good outcome if the surgical staff were dropping like flies with COVID they would get from the regular flow of patients? Alternatively, could the procedure be expected to work as reliably if the staff were wearing all that extra personal protection gear? That is not the conditions under which the procedure was developed and its benefits determined to be worth the risk... I hope that our global experience produced enough data for someone to come up with better answers before the next novel pandemic. But, I don't know how you plow through all the inconsistencies in the data to come to any statistically valid conclusions. I.e. we have different regions/subpopulations who, in effect, ran different arms of an experiment. But, how can we compare their outcomes with sufficient rigor to find clear answers?
- getnormality 11mo ago
  I agree it can be seen this way. The pandemic years were the perfect time for everyone to lose their minds. On the other hand, negative performance trends started in the early 2010s, and this may be more associated with the phone-based childhood.
TimPC 11mo ago
Earning a 4.0 GPA in high school math while only knowing middle school math seems absolutely wild. Is that truly a side effect of COVID or are certain schools just going to be heavily penalized in admissions because their standards are far too low?
- getnormality 11mo ago
  Yes, in fact the UCSD report explicitly says they will have no choice but to penalize entire schools in their "math index" if standardized testing is not reintroduced. There are school systems where teachers are not allowed to give anything less than a D equivalent grade, even if the student didn't engage with the assignment at all. I would panic if I found out my kid went to such a school!
  - ModernMech 11mo ago
    Worse, some school systems require teachers to accept student work at any time. I have teacher friends who tell me stories about students who don't do anything all semester. Then in the last week, somehow all the work gets done and submitted, and it's all passing. Obviously what's happening is the parents are doing all the student's work, and the teacher is forced to pretend it's genuine. Then there are the systems which only teach "theoretical" work. I had a student who said he could program, passed a bunch of classes called "programming in C++" and such, only to learn he hadn't written a program ever -- he had just been taught the theory of writing a program. It's like taking calculus but never doing an integral.
- greenavocado 11mo ago
  A bombshell report just released by the Maryland Inspector General for Education shows more than twelve thousand failing grades were changed to passing over a five-year period in Baltimore City Schools. Updated Wed, June 8, 2022 at 5:29 AM https://oige.maryland.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites/18/2024/02/Report-OIGE-Case-20_0003_I_-Grade-Changing-Report-Case-20-0003-I-06072022_Redacted-V3.pdf https://oige.maryland.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites/18/2024/0... For fourth straight year, no students test proficient in math at Baltimore high school Updated Tue, September 16, 2025 at 10:14 AM https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/baltimore-city-high-school-sonja-santelises-achievement-academy-math-proficiency https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/baltimore-ci... Zero students test math proficient in 23 schools, as Maryland boosts funding by $2 billion Updated Wed, September 17, 2025 at 10:31 PM https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/zero-students-math-proficient-maryland-mcap https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/zero-student...
jleyank 11mo ago
Grade inflation and automatic promotion had nothing to do with Covid - it was occurring when at uni in the 70's, with dean's list definitions changing to reflect higher GPA's. Covid isolation might have made things worse, but starting from a mediocre beginning it might also not be significant. People who are interested in subjects, and have anywhere competent teachers tend to do well. Those who are disinterested, or faced with "disappointing" teachers do less well. The spread of things like ChatGPT is going to make things worse. And there's a whole lot of parents who are certain their precious offspring are (well) above average. Wasn't that a feature of Lake Wobegone? EDIT: and how common is the attitude "I paid a lot for your product, give me the grades..."?
- Teever 11mo ago
  You bring up something that I thought about a while back but never took the time to do any research on. To what extent was grade inflation of young men during the 60s and 70s common place due to the draft for the Vietnam war? It seems to me that there's a likely possibility that professors and graders would be more willing to go easy on male students to prevent them from being sent to fight in Vietnam. I wonder if anyone has done analysis on the grades from the era has has detected a measurable different.
  - jleyank 11mo ago
    ‘Nam ended in the early 70’s and I think the student deferment ended before the war did. But it’s a good theory. Much of academia was probably not on board. Perhaps the war edited out some classes of students that influenced grades?
tippa123 11mo ago
Just curious isn’t there a minimum baseline in the US for numeracy and literacy for you to even enroll in higher education? In the UK you needed to have at least a C in maths and English to study at a university. This was 17 years ago. This was not negotiable and I believe applied to all universities and all courses.
- apparent 11mo ago
  In theory, yes. But as the report makes clear, grade inflation is rampant. 25% of the students in remedial math had a 4.0 (straight A) GPA in math during high school. And over 40% of the remedial math students had taken precalc or calculus in high school.
ModernMech 11mo ago
I'm seeing this myself, I had to explain to a freshman student last week what a colon is and where to find it on the keyboard. That's a first in 7 years.
- ghaff 11mo ago
  In fairness for professional/jounalistic writing, colons sometimes make sense. But a past blog and PR editor where I worked would routinely strike out semicolons. I use them sometimes but I find it often makes sense to avoid more complex sentences and punctuation.
johann8384 11mo ago
What was the driver for the change in admissions testing? Was the SAT or ACT considered bad? Or were too many students getting low scores?
- alephnerd 11mo ago
  The political atmosphere following George Floyd and "defund the police", as there was a then somewhat fringe position that standardized testing was racist (yet low income and marginalized Asian communities like Vietnamese and Cambodians and immigrant African communities being able to match or exceed performance of White Californians was ignored) came to the fore, which lead to the politicially easy and popular option of making standardized testing optional. This lead to a populist overcorrection in California to increase UC admissions from Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) schools which tended to skew low income and non-white/non-Asian (though plenty of Asians fall under LCFF schools as plenty of Vietnamese, Hmong, and Cambodian Californians can attest). Ideally, UC and CSU admissions need to be restricted (90th-100th percentile at a UC, 70th-100th percentile at CSU, and everyone else at a CC) in order to push students who need some remedial learning to be provided it at Community Colleges - just like the Warren Plan said when the 3 tiered California Model of Education was developed - but community colleges are perceived as being "lower tier" and breaking barriers is viewed as a quick populist win. Ironically, it wasn't even mainstream Latiné or African American politicans in California that were driving this policy - it was progressive leaning organizations whose membership are overwhelmingly upper middle class White and Asian Americans who attended Ivies, top UCs, and elite B10s. Expanding funding and the quality of services provided at the K-12 level would have helped solve the issue in a 5-10 year timeframe, but the populist overreaction now puts actually smart policies like LCFF at risk of being cut due to a populist counter-reaction. That said, I find it telling that the AEI also doesn't mention that Harvard also doubled down on legacy admissions following the Supreme Court ruling against affirmative action - and admissions for all races other than White dropped at Harvard. That in itself is flagrant hypocrisy in the face of meritocracy. Furthermore, if we are seeing students who need additional courses to remediate educational issues, I don't necessarily see an issue around offering such academic services in any program - be it Harvard or your local state college. And at least at Harvard, remedial math and English classes had been offered in the 1990s and 2000s. Both progressive coded policies like "equity" via reduced standards and conservative coded polices like dropping affirmative action hurt meritocracy. To someone like me, it looks like a culture war between White and Black Americans, and those of us who are Indigenous, Asian, or Latiné Americans are catching strays.
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
waffletower 11mo ago
Hilarious for a commentator on college preparation to show such a lack of command of English grammar: "That last phrase is a euphemism for low-income, minority youths whose interest K–12 education’s love affair with “equity” is intended to serve." When I was in a Humanities sequence at UC San Diego, the singular presence of such a run-on in a paper assignment would have garnered the grade of "C" regardless of surrounding context.
- alephnerd 11mo ago
  > the singular presence of such a run-on in a paper assignment would have garnered the grade of "C" regardless of surrounding context It wouldn't have been given a C, and I say this as someone who was a TF/TA for these kinds of classes at UCSD tier programs, and as such spent hours grading these kinds of essays. I think there are flaws with the article's argument, but your retort is not touching on those.
  - waffletower 11mo ago
    I certainly didn't have you as a TA. Grammar was way over-emphasized -- often at the expense of content -- in my time. You are also invited to read between the lines and consider the meaning of the sentence I chose to highlight (though difficult to parse). Then perhaps you can reassess whether I addressed the content of the article beyond grammarian finger pointing.
    - illiac786 11mo ago
      Read between the lines, really? Why would you hide your message between the lines, what’s the point? Just to make sure people misunderstand you? And yes, my grammar suck - to get back on (your) topic.
- morcus 11mo ago
  Punctuation conventions are not part of English grammar.
  - 11mo ago
marssaxman 11mo ago
It should come as no surprise that a conservative think-tank would immediately blame "K–12 education’s love affair with 'equity'." I don't think I need to read any more of this.
- getnormality 11mo ago
  I actually wanted to find a nonpartisan source, but couldn't easily find one that was willing to center the actual central point of the UCSD report: that the university can no longer identify math-ready students due to the removal of standardized testing from the admissions process, and they are begging for UC system to reconsider standardized testing.
  - marssaxman 11mo ago
    Thank you for looking for one!
- hellisothers 11mo ago
  As a not-conservative with a child in middle school (in CA) this rings true though. We pulled our son out of a highly rated public school essentially because of this, the whole class was taught to the lowest common denominator.
  - BobaFloutist 11mo ago
    Sure, but I don't know that the NCLB Act is traditionally considered "DEI"
  - porridgeraisin 11mo ago
    I've heard this for many years now, can you give me a concrete example or two? Note: I'm just curious, not even from the US
- apparent 11mo ago
  If you look at the report, it shows the facts support this claim. UCSD has gone all-in on LCFF+ schools (low income, ELL, foster youth) and the explosion in math and literacy remediation is driven by these admits. One in three LCFF+ admits end up in remedial math, and the total remedial math population is more than 50% LCFF+ admits. What was the motivator for this post-2020 change? Equity, or the idea that outcomes for all groups should be equal (regardless of time/energy expended, of course).
helterskelter 11mo ago
So in the article I read on AP or Reuters, 1/8 freshmen had below a middle school level of proficiency in math. If you're from outside the US, middle school is for kids aged ~11-14.
- apparent 11mo ago
  Yes, and 1/3 of students admitted from LCFF+ schools (low-income, ELL, foster) are in remedial math. These students make up the majority of remedial math students. Pretty unbelievable, considering how hard it is to get into UCSD if you're not from an LCFF+ school. It's basically a huge thumb on the scale, from an admissions perspective.
johnea 11mo ago
tl;dr Universities should really only accept wealthy white students who attended Bishop's High School. It's without doubt that lower income high schools have lower academic outcomes. This leads to the conclusion that only students from wealthy districts should be admitted to higher education. Because we would never want to fund school districts equally. That would be commonism...

34 points by getnormality 11mo ago

I feel like this is nothing more than a side effect of what happened with Covid. Which would mean if we were willing to shut things down like we did we should be willing to take the secondary effects and solve those problems too.

rogerrogerr 11mo ago
The health establishment did not appear to think about children’s futures, only about making sure 86 year olds made it to 87.
- piva00 11mo ago
  This is personally offending to me, I lost two friends in their 40s in Brazil when Bolsonaro acted like Trump, and didn't implement any federal policy to lower risks during the first year of the pandemic. Your take is stupid, that's how discourse goes now though, stupid hot takes from people who don't want to think, ponied up as some grand opinion while padded with derision and cynicism. It's just stupid... And quite tiresome, be better.
  - rogerrogerr 11mo ago
    I lost a relative because they wouldn’t let us in the hospital, waited too long to put in a stent while giving us the runaround over the phone, and caused lasting heart damage that took their life not long afterwards. We couldn’t advocate for them. My take is not stupid. I saw the damage shutdowns caused personally. It’s offensive to me that you call my lived experience a “stupid hot take”.
    - saltcured 11mo ago
      Not to diminish your loss, but this whole debate is mired in the difficulty in moving from individual outcomes to aggregates that matter for public health policy. Things got ugly (and will do so again in the future) facing something novel, where many basic assumptions we have about individual results are based on other baseline assumptions that are no longer true. The very expectation of a good surgical outcome for a common stent surgery is based on statistics from "normal" times. But, would the procedure have helped if the surgery was expected to cause COVID exposure, and the patient could have that severe respiratory illness during their surgical recovery? Would it be a good outcome if the surgical staff were dropping like flies with COVID they would get from the regular flow of patients? Alternatively, could the procedure be expected to work as reliably if the staff were wearing all that extra personal protection gear? That is not the conditions under which the procedure was developed and its benefits determined to be worth the risk... I hope that our global experience produced enough data for someone to come up with better answers before the next novel pandemic. But, I don't know how you plow through all the inconsistencies in the data to come to any statistically valid conclusions. I.e. we have different regions/subpopulations who, in effect, ran different arms of an experiment. But, how can we compare their outcomes with sufficient rigor to find clear answers?
getnormality 11mo ago
I agree it can be seen this way. The pandemic years were the perfect time for everyone to lose their minds. On the other hand, negative performance trends started in the early 2010s, and this may be more associated with the phone-based childhood.

TimPC 11mo ago

Earning a 4.0 GPA in high school math while only knowing middle school math seems absolutely wild. Is that truly a side effect of COVID or are certain schools just going to be heavily penalized in admissions because their standards are far too low?

getnormality 11mo ago
Yes, in fact the UCSD report explicitly says they will have no choice but to penalize entire schools in their "math index" if standardized testing is not reintroduced. There are school systems where teachers are not allowed to give anything less than a D equivalent grade, even if the student didn't engage with the assignment at all. I would panic if I found out my kid went to such a school!
- ModernMech 11mo ago
  Worse, some school systems require teachers to accept student work at any time. I have teacher friends who tell me stories about students who don't do anything all semester. Then in the last week, somehow all the work gets done and submitted, and it's all passing. Obviously what's happening is the parents are doing all the student's work, and the teacher is forced to pretend it's genuine. Then there are the systems which only teach "theoretical" work. I had a student who said he could program, passed a bunch of classes called "programming in C++" and such, only to learn he hadn't written a program ever -- he had just been taught the theory of writing a program. It's like taking calculus but never doing an integral.
greenavocado 11mo ago
A bombshell report just released by the Maryland Inspector General for Education shows more than twelve thousand failing grades were changed to passing over a five-year period in Baltimore City Schools. Updated Wed, June 8, 2022 at 5:29 AM https://oige.maryland.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites/18/2024/02/Report-OIGE-Case-20_0003_I_-Grade-Changing-Report-Case-20-0003-I-06072022_Redacted-V3.pdf https://oige.maryland.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites/18/2024/0... For fourth straight year, no students test proficient in math at Baltimore high school Updated Tue, September 16, 2025 at 10:14 AM https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/baltimore-city-high-school-sonja-santelises-achievement-academy-math-proficiency https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/baltimore-ci... Zero students test math proficient in 23 schools, as Maryland boosts funding by $2 billion Updated Wed, September 17, 2025 at 10:31 PM https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/zero-students-math-proficient-maryland-mcap https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/zero-student...

jleyank 11mo ago

Grade inflation and automatic promotion had nothing to do with Covid - it was occurring when at uni in the 70's, with dean's list definitions changing to reflect higher GPA's. Covid isolation might have made things worse, but starting from a mediocre beginning it might also not be significant. People who are interested in subjects, and have anywhere competent teachers tend to do well. Those who are disinterested, or faced with "disappointing" teachers do less well. The spread of things like ChatGPT is going to make things worse. And there's a whole lot of parents who are certain their precious offspring are (well) above average. Wasn't that a feature of Lake Wobegone? EDIT: and how common is the attitude "I paid a lot for your product, give me the grades..."?

Teever 11mo ago
You bring up something that I thought about a while back but never took the time to do any research on. To what extent was grade inflation of young men during the 60s and 70s common place due to the draft for the Vietnam war? It seems to me that there's a likely possibility that professors and graders would be more willing to go easy on male students to prevent them from being sent to fight in Vietnam. I wonder if anyone has done analysis on the grades from the era has has detected a measurable different.
- jleyank 11mo ago
  ‘Nam ended in the early 70’s and I think the student deferment ended before the war did. But it’s a good theory. Much of academia was probably not on board. Perhaps the war edited out some classes of students that influenced grades?

tippa123 11mo ago

Just curious isn’t there a minimum baseline in the US for numeracy and literacy for you to even enroll in higher education? In the UK you needed to have at least a C in maths and English to study at a university. This was 17 years ago. This was not negotiable and I believe applied to all universities and all courses.

apparent 11mo ago
In theory, yes. But as the report makes clear, grade inflation is rampant. 25% of the students in remedial math had a 4.0 (straight A) GPA in math during high school. And over 40% of the remedial math students had taken precalc or calculus in high school.

ModernMech 11mo ago

I'm seeing this myself, I had to explain to a freshman student last week what a colon is and where to find it on the keyboard. That's a first in 7 years.

ghaff 11mo ago
In fairness for professional/jounalistic writing, colons sometimes make sense. But a past blog and PR editor where I worked would routinely strike out semicolons. I use them sometimes but I find it often makes sense to avoid more complex sentences and punctuation.

johann8384 11mo ago

What was the driver for the change in admissions testing? Was the SAT or ACT considered bad? Or were too many students getting low scores?

alephnerd 11mo ago
The political atmosphere following George Floyd and "defund the police", as there was a then somewhat fringe position that standardized testing was racist (yet low income and marginalized Asian communities like Vietnamese and Cambodians and immigrant African communities being able to match or exceed performance of White Californians was ignored) came to the fore, which lead to the politicially easy and popular option of making standardized testing optional. This lead to a populist overcorrection in California to increase UC admissions from Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) schools which tended to skew low income and non-white/non-Asian (though plenty of Asians fall under LCFF schools as plenty of Vietnamese, Hmong, and Cambodian Californians can attest). Ideally, UC and CSU admissions need to be restricted (90th-100th percentile at a UC, 70th-100th percentile at CSU, and everyone else at a CC) in order to push students who need some remedial learning to be provided it at Community Colleges - just like the Warren Plan said when the 3 tiered California Model of Education was developed - but community colleges are perceived as being "lower tier" and breaking barriers is viewed as a quick populist win. Ironically, it wasn't even mainstream Latiné or African American politicans in California that were driving this policy - it was progressive leaning organizations whose membership are overwhelmingly upper middle class White and Asian Americans who attended Ivies, top UCs, and elite B10s. Expanding funding and the quality of services provided at the K-12 level would have helped solve the issue in a 5-10 year timeframe, but the populist overreaction now puts actually smart policies like LCFF at risk of being cut due to a populist counter-reaction. That said, I find it telling that the AEI also doesn't mention that Harvard also doubled down on legacy admissions following the Supreme Court ruling against affirmative action - and admissions for all races other than White dropped at Harvard. That in itself is flagrant hypocrisy in the face of meritocracy. Furthermore, if we are seeing students who need additional courses to remediate educational issues, I don't necessarily see an issue around offering such academic services in any program - be it Harvard or your local state college. And at least at Harvard, remedial math and English classes had been offered in the 1990s and 2000s. Both progressive coded policies like "equity" via reduced standards and conservative coded polices like dropping affirmative action hurt meritocracy. To someone like me, it looks like a culture war between White and Black Americans, and those of us who are Indigenous, Asian, or Latiné Americans are catching strays.

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]

waffletower 11mo ago

Hilarious for a commentator on college preparation to show such a lack of command of English grammar: "That last phrase is a euphemism for low-income, minority youths whose interest K–12 education’s love affair with “equity” is intended to serve." When I was in a Humanities sequence at UC San Diego, the singular presence of such a run-on in a paper assignment would have garnered the grade of "C" regardless of surrounding context.

alephnerd 11mo ago
> the singular presence of such a run-on in a paper assignment would have garnered the grade of "C" regardless of surrounding context It wouldn't have been given a C, and I say this as someone who was a TF/TA for these kinds of classes at UCSD tier programs, and as such spent hours grading these kinds of essays. I think there are flaws with the article's argument, but your retort is not touching on those.
- waffletower 11mo ago
  I certainly didn't have you as a TA. Grammar was way over-emphasized -- often at the expense of content -- in my time. You are also invited to read between the lines and consider the meaning of the sentence I chose to highlight (though difficult to parse). Then perhaps you can reassess whether I addressed the content of the article beyond grammarian finger pointing.
  - illiac786 11mo ago
    Read between the lines, really? Why would you hide your message between the lines, what’s the point? Just to make sure people misunderstand you? And yes, my grammar suck - to get back on (your) topic.
morcus 11mo ago
Punctuation conventions are not part of English grammar.
- 11mo ago

marssaxman 11mo ago

It should come as no surprise that a conservative think-tank would immediately blame "K–12 education’s love affair with 'equity'." I don't think I need to read any more of this.

getnormality 11mo ago
I actually wanted to find a nonpartisan source, but couldn't easily find one that was willing to center the actual central point of the UCSD report: that the university can no longer identify math-ready students due to the removal of standardized testing from the admissions process, and they are begging for UC system to reconsider standardized testing.
- marssaxman 11mo ago
  Thank you for looking for one!
hellisothers 11mo ago
As a not-conservative with a child in middle school (in CA) this rings true though. We pulled our son out of a highly rated public school essentially because of this, the whole class was taught to the lowest common denominator.
- BobaFloutist 11mo ago
  Sure, but I don't know that the NCLB Act is traditionally considered "DEI"
- porridgeraisin 11mo ago
  I've heard this for many years now, can you give me a concrete example or two? Note: I'm just curious, not even from the US
apparent 11mo ago
If you look at the report, it shows the facts support this claim. UCSD has gone all-in on LCFF+ schools (low income, ELL, foster youth) and the explosion in math and literacy remediation is driven by these admits. One in three LCFF+ admits end up in remedial math, and the total remedial math population is more than 50% LCFF+ admits. What was the motivator for this post-2020 change? Equity, or the idea that outcomes for all groups should be equal (regardless of time/energy expended, of course).

helterskelter 11mo ago

So in the article I read on AP or Reuters, 1/8 freshmen had below a middle school level of proficiency in math. If you're from outside the US, middle school is for kids aged ~11-14.

apparent 11mo ago
Yes, and 1/3 of students admitted from LCFF+ schools (low-income, ELL, foster) are in remedial math. These students make up the majority of remedial math students. Pretty unbelievable, considering how hard it is to get into UCSD if you're not from an LCFF+ school. It's basically a huge thumb on the scale, from an admissions perspective.

johnea 11mo ago

tl;dr Universities should really only accept wealthy white students who attended Bishop's High School. It's without doubt that lower income high schools have lower academic outcomes. This leads to the conclusion that only students from wealthy districts should be admitted to higher education. Because we would never want to fund school districts equally. That would be commonism...