Posted on 04/08/2025 9:41:43 AM PDT by george76
According to The Harvard Crimson, Harvard will offer high-school-level math courses to its students. The remedial assistance has rekindled criticism over Harvard’s move away from standardized tests in making admissions decisions.
For years, Harvard has been accused of lowering admissions standards to achieve “equity” goals in its classes. The school opposed efforts to uncover its admissions data. When that data was ultimately revealed, sharp differences emerged based on race. The differences led to the historic decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, 600 U.S. 181 (2023) barring the use of race in college admissions.
As court decisions made it clear that the period of race-based criteria was coming to an end, systems like the University of California dumped standardized testing, while others decreased the reliance on such scores. Without standardized testing as an objective measure of comparison, challenges based on race would be more difficult to establish.
Critics have raised that history in light of the recent announcement. It would have been unthinkable in prior years for Harvard to offer remedial high-school-level courses for admitted students.
Nevertheless, Harvard’s director of introductory math, Brendan Kelly, told The Harvard Crimson that the cause was the pandemic. He said that Harvard students “don’t have the skills that we had intended downstream in the curriculum. We want to make sure that students are on a path to success starting from their first day.”
It is an odd explanation since most students deemed competitive for the top schools have excelled on standardized tests. The school was obviously selecting on other criteria than proven excellence in basic areas of study.
Since 1636, Harvard long insisted on the very top scores from students for admission. The result was that it became one of the world’s premier and most exclusive universities. Yet, in one generation, the current faculty and administrators have reduced its standards to the point that students must retake basic high school courses.
While the university’s standards have obviously declined, faculty and administrators have substituted their own priorities — and interests — for those of the institution.
Many agreed with Ibram X. Kendi that standardized testing was based on racism and perpetuated racial inequality. He insisted in 2020 that “standardized tests have become the most effective racist weapon ever devised to objectively degrade black and brown minds and legally exclude their bodies from prestigious schools.”
Ironically, standardized tests have been found to be the most predictive measure of success in college.
As noted by the New York Times, studies at Ivy League schools show that GPAs hold limited value as predictors of success while test scores are highly indicative of success.
It does not matter in today’s academic environment. Then University of California President Janet Napolitano caved to this movement.
Notably, academics in the California system came to the same conclusion as Dartmouth years ago. Napolitano, however, overrode those conclusions.
Napolitano responded to the claims of racism in the use of SAT scores with a Standardized Testing Task Force in 2019. Many people expected the task force to recommend the cessation of standardized testing. The task force did find that 59 percent of high school graduates were Latino, African-American or Native American but only 37 percent were admitted as UC freshman students. The Task Force did not find standardized testing to be unreliable or call for its abandonment, however.
Instead, its final report concluded that “At UC, test scores are currently better predictors of first-year GPA than high school grade point average (HSGPA), and about as good at predicting first-year retention, [University] GPA, and graduation.”
Not only that, it found: “Further, the amount of variance in student outcomes explained by test scores has increased since 2007 … Test scores are predictive for all demographic groups and disciplines … In fact, test scores are better predictors of success for students who are Underrepresented Minority Students (URMs), who are first generation, or whose families are low-income.” In other words, test scores remain the best indicator for continued performance in college.
That clearly was not the result Napolitano or some others wanted. So, she simply announced a cessation of the use of such scores in admissions. The system will go to a “test-blind” system until or unless it develops its own test.
Even the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) yielded to this movement during the pandemic by dropping the use of standardized testing requirements. However, MIT later reversed that decision and reinstated the use of the tests as key to preserving its elite status as an educational institution.
Of course, this controversy cannot ignore that our high schools are cranking out students who cannot do high-school level math. Indeed, many have moved away from standardized tests to achieve equity. Others have lowered standards or dropped proficiency standards for graduation. Others have eliminated gifted and talented programs to avoid inequitable results.
The combination of such equity policies has finally reached Harvard which is now compelled to reduce classes to high-school levels to meet minimal standards for students.
Have read that MIT is doing the same - which is quite shocking, because its a STEM school
Here is the description of the Math MA5 course
https://www.math.harvard.edu/course/ma5/
The study of functions and their rates of change. Fundamental ideas of calculus are introduced early and used to provide a framework for the study of mathematical modeling involving algebraic, exponential, and logarithmic functions. A thorough understanding of differential calculus is promoted by year-long reinforcement.
(Don't know what a slide rule is for.)
Do a google image search for “accepted into all the ivies”. All will be revealed.
Harvard, Columbia, New York University, the University of Pennsylvania and Barnard College. worst universities for free speech:
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/4262966/posts
High stakes standardized tests do not include test questions which perform in a disparate manner among ethnicities. Test questions included in an exam perform equitably across the racial spectrum. This has been discussed at the school level, and yet give it a few years and the accusation of racism arises again.
The class meets 5 days a week.
I should guess so. :-)
Is MIT still a STEM school? It acts like it's more of a leftist indoctrination school with a large math department.
......standardized tests have been found to be the most predictive measure of success in college.....
Then keep using them! No more DEI!
I wonder if the school has to mark the door of the classroom with some kind of special insignia so the special kids can figure out which door to enter. It's not like they could label it Room 227, or something like that.
MIT returned to using SATs in admissions!
With so many students who apply to MIT, Harvard, etc. taking AP Calculus in high school, there is no excuse for admitting math-deficient students to elite colleges!
By the way, I advance-placed one term of Calculus at MIT. Math was my worst subject at MIT—I got all C’s. But I got nearly all A’s in everything else (even Organic Chemistry), and won an NSF Graduate Fellowship, which I used at Harvard.
Harvard undergraduates can afford to get C’s in Math, if they get mainly A’s. But students who can’t pass Math don’t belong in elite colleges.
Not surprising in the least. The “top university” mantra hasn’t been true in a long time. At this point in our history, going to a ‘name’ university is like buying the equivalent of Levi’s for $1,500 because there’s some Italian name affixed to them. Except it’s a lot more expensive.
Remedial writing courses were mandatory when I was a freshman in 1978 at Temple University in Philadelphia.
For me they were redundant since I attended a high school with good college prep classes.
Yeah. High school level basic differential calculus.
NOT EVEN INTEGRAL CALCULUS. Which I took in HS. (No AP classes then, just “Enriched” level classes like English IV E ; or as Chem 2, Physics 2, Numeric Analysis, Calculus. These were all college-level classes accepted for credit at the universities at time.
Differential Calculus, then Integral Calculus were a REQUIRED minimum freshman year math classes for engineering and the sciences at A&M.
Unless you are an (illiterate) English or Arts or Political Science student, no student at the “Ivy League” level of schools should be able to hand in an application form without at least full college-level math and English classes already in-hand.
Students beware; there must be a way the so-called instructors can work wokeism and CRT into a basic math course.
My university used to have “development studies” courses for math and reading (which did not count towards graduation). It included grade-school level math classes. When I was on a committee hearing appeals from students (for being suspended) there was one student who had failed grade school math six times. She was a social work major.
Tom Lehrer is still around at 96. Get him to teach the course.
He started studying math at Harvard when he was 15 and never killed anyone.
In January 2023, CUNY issued this notice:
CUNY Ends Traditional Remedial Courses
A month later, the NY Post offered this article:
Colleges have been teaching Bonehead English to incoming freshmen for decades. Now they’re teaching Bonehead Math?
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