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 ...
Dear FRiends,
We need your continuing support to keep FR funded. Your donations are our sole source of funding. No sugar daddies, no advertisers, no paid memberships, no commercial sales, no gimmicks, no tax subsidies. No spam, no pop-ups, no ad trackers.
If you enjoy using FR and agree it's a worthwhile endeavor, please consider making a contribution today:
Click here: to donate by Credit Card
Or here: to donate by PayPal
Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794
Thank you very much and God bless you,
Jim
It was just so sad to see. These were grown young men just stumbling through life without even the most basic education to manage.
They’ll make for excellent future politicians.
Some integrals can’t be solved into an equation so they can only be handled thru numerical integration.
https://demonstrations.wolfram.com/SomeGaussianIntegrals/
“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.”
Didn’t she attend Stanford?
You produce entitled and resentful students, none of whom can understand balancing a checkbook, the power of savings and investing over a lifetime, exp(x), solving fractions, solving simple algebraic equations, let alone differential and integral calculus.
They don't know history even though you can watch TV and videos of it all day all night every day.
But I am sure they haven't stopped giving these kids all the usual awards and honors.
So when they get confronted with candidates like AOC, and Bernie, and those other terrible Moose Limbs, all spouting Communism and how great it is, they go along full blast.
All a part of the AFT NEA plan to turn the kids into dumbass Communists.
Useful idiots.
So stupid they can't understand inflation, hyperinflation, savings, the dangers of our massive national debt, and unretrievable personal debt.
Of course they are going to go along with some liars like DSA politicians telling them that they've been screwed by the Boomers.
Fact is they were screwed by all the Gubmint officials who gave them free stuff for years and years. Who hyperinflated the cost of houses and college tuition. Who shipped their jobs off to Mexico and China and told them to take Gender Studies and Poli Sci at college because they were soooooooo smart.
Make them feel deprived, make them embittered, keep them entitled, and blame the working upper middle and working upper classes for their ignorance and inability to cut the mustard of life.
Then they take life advice from guys like Bernie and AOC, and other internet influencers, who haven't done a day's work in their lives.
Paquette used to make sure the spotlights were right on his face! You had to tape lectures and follow the boards in front like your life depended on it.
Good prof, though.
Yup. Hard. Capital H. Got an A, but man.
I believe I posted this two days ago on another thread:
I taught financial accounting at a large state university for 35 years. Each year on day one, I asked students to calculate 38 percent of 100. In my last 5 years, 2010-2015, fewer than half of the students could answer that question, with or without a calculator.
They had no concept of percent, fractions or decimal placement. For most, the number 1,000 and 100,000 were functionally the same.
They weren’t stupid. I was able to teach them the concepts of assets, liabilities and capital plus the rules of debit and credit. I could not, however, make up for the 12 years of math concepts that they never learned. Without those concepts, analysis of financial statements is impossible.
Okay, I used to teach Middle School math for a few years. Let’s see if I can adapt it to today’s Young Skulls Full Of Mush.
x(DEI) + AOC = y
Solve for AOC
Hint - there is no wrong answer.
LOL! Yeaaah, we got calculators and stuff on our cellphones dude!
This reminds me 20 years ago I lived in New York city and worked for a distribution company in Brooklyn that delivered food products.
One day we had OSHA come in because the warehouse workers (mostly black guys) had to take a training class in safety which involved forklifts, trucks etc and the instructor made the fatal mistake of asking them to read from the instruction manual in turn..
The first guy couldn’t get through the first sentence, the second guy got through a sentence barely and the third guy couldn’t get past 4 words and finally the instructor said “OK lets skip the reading out loud part” LOL!
They are the Bernie bros, the islamo dingbat aoc squad, Mamdumby, cousin marrying, Ethiopian democrat socialists of America.
My sister was teaching third grade math at the time. She said that her students found the metric system (SI) much easier to understand than the U S Customary “system”. U S Customary is such a mess that I cannot logically call it a system. It’s time for U S Customary measurement to join Roman numerals in the relic box of history.
“ They really need to teach compound interest as well as basic probability and statistics in high school.”
For anyone not planning to continue on to study something requiring calculus, these topics are far more important than even pre-calculus. Before anyone learns algebra, it is much more important to understand percentages thoroughly. Basic math like that is skimmed so kids can learn 2X plus 3X equals 5X earlier.
Back in the 70s it was thought that we would be fully converted to the metric system within 10 years. It seems ridiculous to keep the antiquated British system, which not even the British use anymore.
I really hope that it is not influenced much by people hoping to keep records in sports like football intact.
That;s pretty “noo”!
They got an app for that stuff
Ping
The nearest big city to me that I visit is around 200 miles from me. How is my life easier if that distance is stated in kilometers?
the metric system works well for science/engineering. It just sucks for real life, the units are either too big i.e. celcius or too small i.e. milimeters
The admissions process as “less like careful evaluation and more like chance.” That’s for sure. One student got rejected by Long Beach State but was accepted by UC Berkeley. Totally random selection of incoming students.
The education system — all of it from top to bottom — has been deliberately sabotaged starting decades ago. But now it’s really catching up to us. We may need to rebuild it from scratch.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.