Posted on 08/16/2026 2:37:28 PM PDT by DFG
A well known University of California-Berkeley mathematics professor has slammed admissions standards at the top-flight university — where she says huge portions of her students are failing to keep up with college calculus and she’s forced to teach middle-school algebra and fractions students.
“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,” wrote Zvezdelina Stankova, of UC Berkeley, in an op-ed piece on Saturday for the San Francisco Standard.
Stankova — who rose through the mathematics world to earn a PhD from Harvard after being born in communist Bulgaria — described the admissions process as “less like careful evaluation and more like chance.”
Stankov has long been an evangelist for teaching math and founded the Berkeley Math Circle as well as a local math olympiad for high school kids — but she says the standards for students at the country’s most elite public university have made its student a laughing stock.
She is one of thousands of faculty members who signed open letters earlier this year calling for the restoration of the SAT and ACT in admissions to ensure the best students are getting in.
Standardized testing was phased out by UC Berkeley in 2020 after then-college president Janet Napolitano — who was Homeland Security Secretary for President Barack Obama — overruled a task force that had called for the entrance exams to be kept.
Citing COVID pandemic disruptions and concerns over equity, testing was made optional later in 2020, with a court ruling subsequently requiring UC to become test-blind through 2025.
And that policy has had a deleterious effect on standards at UC Berkeley, Stankova said.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
As in current high schools: “You have four fentanyl packets and the local thugs demand you give them half or they’ll slash your throat. How many packets do you have left to sell at the elementary school lot?”
The reason? Educators decided that math and science were unnecessary.
Being math teachers, they were in the minority of students/humans and found the traditional way of teaching arithmetic, drills, memorization of facts and emphasis on getting the correct answer both boring and stifling. They thought and still think that the ‘best’ way to teach math is the way they naturally learned it, by discovering the, to them, beautiful patterns inherent in mathematics.
When I first started teaching in the early 70s, Modern Math was the new and improved thing. I can remember teaching poor 4th and 5th graders how to compute in base six. Forget memorizing the times tables, add 4 + 2 to get 10, base 6.
You can’t do fractions easily if you don’t know your times tables as well as your own name. Memorization of times tables is now very frowned upon.
Science teachers to a lesser extent followed a similar path. Rather than have students memorized basic science facts, the modern way is to ‘let the kids discover them on their own.
Add these flaws to the current idea that every kid has to pass no matter how little he or she does in class and you have university students who cannot do fractions, which when I was a nipper was considered a skill to be mastered in the 5th grade.
Remember when you’d see bumper stickers saying “If you can read this thank a teacher”?
Not anymore.
Integral calculus always seemed to invoke some annoying “identity trick” to get the problem down to any easier form. I found differential calculus to be much easier much more straightforward. Anyway to each his own!
See Paul Nahin’s book “ Inside Interesting Integrals”.
“Integral calculus always seemed to invoke some annoying “identity trick” to get the problem down to any easier form.”
I was terrible at calculus in college. The “identity trick”? Is that where you would try it, do about 6 more steps in the equation and then find out it didn’t work and go back and try another trick?
They really need to teach compound interest as well as basic probability and statistics in high school. The underlying math is below the calculus level.
The problem is they focus on the bottom 25% of students instead of sending these students to shop and home economics.
.......the restoration of the SAT and ACT in admissions to ensure the best students are getting in.......
Good! Then add a remedial math course-—middle-school level through advanced algebra, trig and precalculus-—for those students who are not ready for calculus and Physics I.
The whole thing is disgusting, however!
Isn’t this the same university that brags because they only admit 10% of white males?
DEI in action!
I thought the whole notion of letting students discover “things” in math and science to be ludicrous. It like teaching reading and writing by letting students discover an “alphabet” first before moving forward! In math K12 students need to be shown the “mechanics” and drilled (practice!) on getting to the right answer until the cows come home. K12 particularly K1 through 6 don’t need to know about number bases other then that they exist.
Why is it ok to practice (drill) to shoot baskets and other sports activities but not practice basic math and language skills? I think we know the answer to this!
F Randy Weingarten.
That c-word has destroyed America by destroying the American children.
Trans BULLSH!T, no kids about to read, mental issues abound, gay this gay that, sex sex sex, racial aggression pushed - NOTHING ABOUT READING, LEARNING ABOUT HISTORY OR MATH.
But if you know the right “trick” it took two steps!
Why is it ok to practice (drill) to shoot baskets and other sports activities but not practice basic math and language skills?
“That’s different!” would be the reply.
It's not just the students. The entire university is a laughing stock.
"She is one of thousands of faculty members who signed open letters earlier this year calling for the restoration of the SAT and ACT in admissions to ensure the best students are getting in."
Do you mean to tell me that these people have not been fired for such racist vociferations?!???
The end result of filling our nation up with Third World 70-IQ retards and giving them all taxpayer-funded college scholarships.
I was an A-student biology major at MIT, except that I got all Cs in math and a C average in physics. The highest As in organic chemistry, however.
Then we had an extremely tough course in physical chemistry/thermodynamics—calculus and differential equations were prerequisite. The professor was exceptionally tough. I surprised myself and everyone else by getting a B. There were many Ds and Fs. Some of the chemists were so jealous of my B-—it might even have been the highest grade in the class! All this from a “C” math student.
The chem department ombudsman had to work hard to deal with this situation, or else most of the chemistry majors would not have graduated! Not so good.
Are DSA the “Noo” Socialists?
“Berkley used to be a top notch school. Then they lowered their admissions standards and admitted Chelsea “Harpo” Clinton and the downward slide began to where the school is now known as Bazerkley.”
Eventually there will have to be a secondary field when rating a college, that being an adjustment given to account for wokeness that varies with year. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if HR departments are already using something like that.
My answer would be no it not! Think of it as pushups for the mind!
Why not just go ahead and admit that she has to teach them to “act more white” ?
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