Failing Diego: Why UC must bring back the SAT/ACT
- Joanne Jacobs
- Jun 13
- 2 min read
Diego and Anna are the children of immigrant parents. Both earned A's in AP Calculus as 11th graders. He earned the lowest grade on the AP exam She earned the highest grade.
Diego was admitted to Berkeley to study mechanical engineering. He has a 50-50 chance of passing Calculus, predicts Svetlana Jitomirskaya, a Berkeley math professor. It's likely he will"spend his entire college career in a frantic, exhausting game of catch-up . . . leaving a hardworking young man’s confidence badly shaken, his engineering dreams derailed, and significant public resources wasted." Anna, who went to a very strong public high school, was rejected at every University of California school, and will start at community college, then transfer.
Bring back the SAT, writes Jitomirskaya in in The Free Press. The best way to help minority and low-income students -- the reason UC went test-blind in 2020 -- is to give them accurate information about their college readiness -- not inflated grades.
The students who make it to her upper-division math courses are very well-prepared, she writes. Students like Diego don't make it that far. But her colleagues teaching introductory gateway courses say some of their students are lost.
“In my second-year engineering class, a student asked me to explain why 1/2 + 1/3 = 5/6,” one professor said. “The lecture had to stop while I explained fractions.”
Some parents "can afford to move to a good school district or send their kids to after-school programs," Jitomirskaya writes. "Children of those who cannot are usually left trapped with subpar math instruction."
Paradoxically, UC's top engineering and STEM programs are admitting fewer students from top public high schools, like Anna's alma mater, Irvine's University High, she writes. San Francisco's Mission High, where 94 percent of students fail to meet state math standards, has a higher acceptance rate to these demanding programs. She crunched the state data: :Today, the more successful a public high school is at preparing its students, the lower its graduates’ chances of getting into top UC campuses like Berkeley and San Diego."
Note that University High students are mostly Asian (41 percent) and white (32 percent) and middle class, while Mission students are mostly Hispanic (69 percent) and black (12 percent).
California's Master Plan for Higher Education called for underprepared students to start in community college, then transfer to the UC or Cal State system. But the campaign to increase “equity” in STEM is pushing the four-year universities to admit unprepared students with inflated grades, she writes. (And community colleges are starting students with very weak foundational math skills in Calculus.)
Anna's "rock-solid mathematical foundation will carry her through wherever she ends up," Jitomirskaya concludes. "But we are actively harming Diego by putting him in a blistering lecture hall where he is set up for a likely devastating failure. And we are harming California by swapping their places."
The democrats in my home state of California have managed to achieve what I thought was impossible: lose population (slightly) in the state with the best weather and some of the most beautiful scenery that attracts successful people from all over the world.
This is what one-party rule looks like. Heck, at least the US Senate has a filibuster! California? Complete dem dominance that is so complete our dem Assembly and Senate have dem super majorities. That means they can overrule the governor whenever they want. So even if Hilton wins in November, the dems can still do whatever they want.
Ca can't fail quick enough! Where is Saint Andreas when you need her?
We should be specific: those who are harming California are Governor Gavin Newsom, Professor Janet Napolitano, and their Regents, since Napolitano, as President of UC, added to the necessity of suspending the test requirement in 2020 the unforced error of phasing it out by 2025, and Newsom went one worse by failing to fight a spurious lawsuit, instead going test blind from 2021; we Californians should do what we can to make sure appropriate prices are paid by making sure Newsom never becomes president, Napolitano loses her public policy professorship at Berkeley (where I studied in better times, and from which my older son, a University High grad who got a 5 in AP Calculus BC as an 11th-grader, was…
Actually, this sentence from the article is the most damning indictment of all:
“In my second-year engineering class, a student asked me to explain why 1/2 + 1/3 = 5/6,” one professor said. “The lecture had to stop while I explained fractions.”
How does a student who doesn't understand fractions (which in my day was required to be mastered by the time you left elementary school, typically grades 1-5) make it as far as a 2nd year engineering course (I'm taking engineering to mean electrical, mechanical, civil, chemical, or computer engineering in this case).
This is why ACT/SAT and college course/subject placement testing should be required of every student who is applying for admission directly from high school...you don't score…
The last paragraph is THE BIG LIE that ed people tell themselves again and again: "it doesn't matter where the top students go. They will do great." This is so completely false. It borders on absurd. The idea by the players is that talent is irrelevant. Credentials are all that matters. I attended high-end, sophisticated Ed School lectures 40 years ago and 20 years ago. The idea is simply to deny talented people education to level the field. They rule.