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 ...
These are the people filling my scripts?
Hoo boy. God bless us, everyone.
Gideon Frankel used to fail 70% of org chem students who were largely pre-med.
Don’t matter. We’s get hired ‘cuz, DUI.
I mean DEI.
George Carlin was right.
“Soon all you’ll need to get into college is a f____g pencil! ‘Get in there, it’s Physics!’”
Do you mean Gideon Fraenkel? He does mechanistic organic chemistry.
I was trained in that approach by Prof. John Sheehan, who pioneered the synthesis of the penicillins. That enabled me to be a very good organic chemistry student, without relying on rote memorization.
Like everybody else, I’ve received penicillin treatments from time to time. Kudos to Dr. Sheehan!
I remember Gideon well. Got my doctorate at Ohio State with Leo Paquette.
Maybe they attended Berkeley..................
Exactly! Having worked in science myself I have learned the truth: the metric system happened because scientists are too dang stubborn to admit they count on their fingers.
“Why not just go ahead and admit that she has to teach them to “act more white”
McGuffey’s Fifth Eclectic Reader, aimed at 10 and 11 year-olds one hundred years ago is far beyond the capabilities of the average high school senior. You can find it online for free to see the contrast.
Ridiculous. My freshman year in college I took calculus and tested out of taking algebra and trig first.
The Metric System is why in Paris a Quarter Pounder is called a ‘Royale With Cheese.’
minus (5-8 years) of math times (70%) of students divided by half = a collegiate?
There must be some formula for this.
Can they balance a checkbook? Do they know how to write a check?
Can they address an envelope? Do they know where to buy stamps?
Do they understand compound interest (h/t alternatives?). Credit cards? Car loans? Even a mortgage?
The answers are mostly “no”.
We have a second-generation of ‘college kids’ that can’t do basic math or budgeting. No wonder we’re in such a mess and the kids want socialism and everything free.
Maybe she can do congress next
At risk of sounding critical of the students, which I am not, I taught some adult education classes in my business of engineering. These were not engineering classes but fundamentals of operation for a new system.
I thought we had dumbed it down enough for most with basic mechanical, electrical and hydraulics backgrounds....NOPE, no way. There was some math (simple arithmetic at maybe sixth grade level) involved but it was simply plug numbers into a set of equations. Forget it. A lot of these students didn’t have even the most simple introduction to even the basics of math and science. NONE at all. They also could not read well or at all. There simply was not enough time to go back to the point they knew something well enough to be familiar or grasp an idea and move forward again in teaching them. They were not dumb but horribly, dreadfully, tragically ignorant.
It was just so sad to see. These were grown young men just stumbling through life without even the most basic education to manage.
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