The SAT, the Math Professors, and the Story Everyone Got Wrong

What the UCSD report actually says about math preparedness, admissions, and the future of the University of California.

Did UC Lower Standards? What the UCSD Math Report Actually Says

How a discussion about calculus readiness became a culture-war argument about merit, DEI, and the future of public education

A note to my usual readers.

This isn’t about GLP-1 drugs, Mediterranean diets, or medical myths. It is about something I care deeply about: education.

Over the past several weeks, I have watched a remarkable transformation take place online. A report written primarily by mathematics faculty at UC San Diego has been turned into proof of everything from the collapse of higher education to the triumph of DEI over merit.

The claims are familiar. Depending on who tells the story, UC students can no longer do middle-school math, admissions standards have collapsed, grade inflation has rendered transcripts meaningless, and DEI has replaced merit. If you spend enough time on social media, it is possible to conclude that the University of California admits students who cannot add fractions while rejecting future Nobel Prize winners.

After reading the report itself, I came away with a different conclusion.

The mathematics faculty have identified a real problem. The internet has made up another story.

Before going further, let me make something clear that may disappoint people on both sides of this argument. I am not opposed to bringing back SAT or ACT scores.

Standardized tests provide useful information. The UCSD mathematics faculty make a reasonable case that SAT Math scores were useful in predicting placement into their mathematics sequence. If the University of California decides to reconsider standardized testing, I would not oppose that discussion.

What the SAT scores actually do is help kids who come from poor high schools often overlooked. One irony in this debate is that standardized tests often help students assume they hurt. A gifted student from a small rural town, an underfunded school district, or a school nobody on an admissions committee has ever heard of can suddenly be seen. ZIP code does not distribute talent.

What I oppose is pretending the report says things it does not say.

And that is exactly what has happened.

Curiously, the report contains detailed information about mathematics preparation, but not the information most commonly cited in online arguments: where the students were educated, their socioeconomic backgrounds, or their racial composition.

What The Report Actually Found

The report documents a substantial increase in students requiring remedial mathematics before entering UC San Diego’s standard precalculus sequence. The authors note that between 2020 and 2025, the number of students whose mathematics skills fell below high-school expectations increased dramatically. They are clearly concerned. They should be.

If I were responsible for teaching calculus, I would be concerned too.

But there is an important distinction between the report’s conclusions and the conclusions people have projected onto it. The report identifies a mathematics preparedness problem.

It does not demonstrate an admissions failure.

Those are not the same thing.

That distinction matters, because most of the online discussion immediately skips the first question and assumes the second has already been proven.

Are California Schools the Problem

The longer I sat with the report, the more one question bothered me.

Not whether the mathematics faculty had identified a problem. They clearly had.

Not whether some students were arriving less prepared for calculus than their professors would like. The evidence for that was right there in the report.

The question I kept returning to was much simpler: Where did these students come from?

The report spends considerable time describing the students who need additional mathematical preparation. It discusses placement. It discusses preparedness. It discusses the possible causes. Yet I found myself searching for something that seemed obvious.

Were these graduates of California public schools?

California private schools?

Out-of-state schools?

International schools?

I may have missed it, but I never found that breakdown.

That omission matters, because much of the online reaction has transformed this report into an indictment of California education. Perhaps the data ultimately supports that conclusion. Perhaps they do not. The point is that we cannot know from the evidence presented.

Before I declare California schools the culprit, I would like to know whether the students in question were educated in California.

Is this another failure of DEI

One thing surprised me while reading both the report and the commentary surrounding it. The report is frequently cited as evidence of a DEI problem, but I could not find a breakdown showing the racial or ethnic composition of the students in remedial mathematics.

That does not mean such a pattern does not exist.

It means the report itself does not appear to establish it.

Before concluding that a preparedness problem is the result of any particular admissions policy, I would like to see the evidence.

The Table Everyone Keeps Posting

If you spend enough time on X, eventually someone posts a screenshot showing students struggling with fractions, decimals, or basic arithmetic.

The implication is always the same:

“These are the students UC is admitting now.”

The reality is more complicated.

The students in that table had already been placed into Math 2, a preparatory mathematics course. The assessment was not administered to all UC students. It was not administered to all STEM students. It was not administered to every student admitted to UC San Diego.

The students represented in that table matter. Their struggles are real. They deserve support.

What the table does not tell us is that all UC students are unable to perform those tasks. Some even made errors when they tested for basic fractions. The internet looked at two students missing a fractions question and declared that UC students cannot do fractions. I looked at the same table and saw two students who either did not know the answer or clicked too quickly. Out of thousands of students, that is not evidence of civilizational collapse. It is a rounding error.

The Number That Should Concern Us

The figure that deserves more attention is not the famous screenshot.

It is the finding that approximately 8.5 percent of students entering majors requiring mathematics were placed into Math 2, while additional students required Math 3B before entering precalculus pathways.

That is a real concern. Unlike the social media screenshots, this finding reflects a broader pattern observed by the mathematics faculty.

But even here, context matters.

The report discusses students entering majors that require mathematics. It is discussing placement into a mathematics curriculum. It is discussing preparedness for calculus pathways. This could be students studying biology, economics, psychology.

It is also not saying what happens to these students over time. It is not discussing whether they will graduate. It is not discussing whether they will become physicians, lawyers, researchers, teachers, or scientists.

It is discussing whether they arrive prepared for the mathematics sequence expected by their intended major. That is an important question.

It is not the only question a university must answer.

The Part Nobody Wants To Talk About

One of the reasons this debate frustrates me is that many who criticise the UC system based on this report want a villain.

For some people, the villain is DEI. For others, it is grade inflation. For others still, it is the SAT. Many of my conversations in social media were with people outside of California telling me, again, how terrible this state is. I love California, my only regret is not moving here sooner.

The report itself points in a different direction. It points to something far more complicated: an entire generation of students whose education was disrupted during some of the most important years of their academic development.

When COVID arrived, schools closed almost overnight. Teachers who had spent careers teaching in classrooms suddenly found themselves teaching through screens. Parents who had never imagined becoming part-time teachers found themselves supervising lessons, troubleshooting technology, and trying to keep children focused while also doing their own jobs.

Some families hired tutors. Many could not.

Some schools adapted quickly. Others were inventing solutions day by day, because there was no playbook for educating millions of children from their bedrooms and kitchen tables.

For younger children, some of that lost time could be recovered. A fourth grader who falls behind in multiplication still has years to catch up. A motivated student can accelerate, take summer courses, and regain lost ground.

My son moved to California when he was in the middle of 4th grade. He had a great school in Phoenix, a charter school. Then he came here, and six weeks after school started, we had to shelter in place. His school had to develop curriculum on the fly, lesson plans translated to Zoom. His mom stayed home and became his teacher. He easily lost half a year.

The challenge is different for students whose disruption occurred during the years when mathematics becomes increasingly cumulative, in high school. Meaning, those students at the UC system today were the ones in high school during COVID. And if you want to be painfully reminded about math in high school: Algebra builds on arithmetic. Trigonometry builds on algebra. Calculus builds on all of them.

Miss a concept in fourth grade, and you may struggle for a while. Miss a concept in Algebra, or just have rudimentary algebra in high school and your chance of making that up is not great. We can see the consequences.

The students entering college today are the students who experienced those disruptions during that critical time in high school. Many learned algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and precalculus through a laptop screen, while the world around them was shutting down.

Some students adapted well. Others struggled. Most probably fell somewhere in between.

The good news is that technology can also be part of the solution. Many mathematics programs now provide immediate feedback, alternative explanations, and individualized examples that simply did not exist when I was a student. Students often receive more practice and guidance than a traditional worksheet ever provided.

But technology does not erase disruption.

When educators talk about the “lost year,” they are not describing a single missed semester. They describe the ripple effects that occur when foundational skills are interrupted during critical stages of learning.

That reality does not fit neatly into a political argument. It does not provide an easy villain. It does not generate viral social media posts.

It does, however, provide a plausible explanation for at least some of what the UCSD mathematics faculty observe.

The Missing Outcome Data

It is not bad to have remedial programs in math for students. It is a proper way to handle the situation. The question becomes, were they so slowed down that it affected them throughout their college years?

Meaning, just because the kids need some remedial math does that mean they are behind in everything else? Are these students graduating? Are they completing their majors? Are they succeeding in graduate and professional schools? Are they becoming successful professionals?

Here is one fact: the University of California schools graduate more of their students than most public schools in the nation. Over 90% of the people who enter the UC system graduate. If the purpose of admissions is to identify students who can succeed at the University of California, graduation remains one of the most important outcomes we can measure. Those are the questions that ultimately matter.

The University of California remains one of the most selective public university systems in the world. It draws from the highest-performing students in the largest state in the nation. Every year, tens of thousands of qualified applicants are denied admission because there are simply not enough seats.

The system is not struggling to find talented students.

The challenge is to decide among many talented students.

That is a very different problem than the one being described online.

What We Should Actually Be Worried About

If there is a lesson in the UCSD report, it is not that higher education has collapsed. It is that educational preparation remains uneven.

Some schools recovered quickly after COVID. Others did not. Some students arrived with strong foundations. Others arrived with significant gaps.

The mathematics faculty at UC San Diego have identified a problem worth taking seriously. They have not proven the collapse of admissions, nor are they sounding that alarm.

The math teachers are not stating that the University of California has abandoned merit.

But they have identified a mathematics preparedness problem. That alone is important enough to deserve our attention. The other question is, will this still be an issue once the crop of students in high school during COVID goes through?

Conclusion:

I still think the mathematics faculty have identified something worth paying attention to. They may even be right that SAT Math would help identify students who need additional preparation before entering the mathematics sequence.

But after reading the report, I came away with a different concern than the one dominating social media.

I am less worried about DEI. I am less worried about California. I am less worried about merit.

I am more worried that we are still seeing the educational aftershocks of COVID, and that we are trying to explain them with political narratives instead of data.

The report raises important questions.

The answers are still being written.