alt Hacker NewsThe processes for delivering remedial classes no longer work at the scale required. UC San Diego published a detailed report of what's happening at their campus (https://senate.ucsd.edu/media/740347/sawg-report-on-admissio...): their remedial math placement grew from 32 students in 2020 to 921 students in 2025, 665 of whom placed into an extra-remedial course covering grade 1-8 math which had not previously been needed.
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> 32 students in 2020 to 921 students in 2025
Seems easy to explain, high schoolers were not in school from 2020-2022 in most areas, so they were two or three years behind in everything when they got to college.
Is there a shortage of students who have a grasp of elementary school math, who apply to UC?
Instead of admitting the captain of the ping-pong team (who can't count past 21 - or past ten without pulling off his boots), maybe admit any one of the students who... Did not have the extracurricular pedigree, but actually applied themselves and passed Math 12?
Surely, there's more than a few hundred of the latter in California.
The system is working as designed. If they don’t want to provide remedial then they need some pre-admission test to weed them out. The students can try again later after maturing more or taking community college classes.