Failing Diego: Why UC must bring back the SAT/ACT

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."