A well known University of California-Berkeley mathematics professor has slammed admissions standards at the top-flight university — where she says huge portions of her students are failing to keep up with college calculus and she’s forced to teach middle-school algebra and fractions students.
“Some students are five to eight years behind in mathematics. Office hours that should be spent discussing integrals instead become lessons on fractions and basic algebra you would expect students to learn in middle school,” wrote Zvezdelina Stankova, of UC Berkeley, in an op-ed piece on Saturday for the San Francisco Standard.
Stankova — who rose through the mathematics world to earn a PhD from Harvard after being born in communist Bulgaria — described the admissions process as “less like careful evaluation and more like chance.”
Stankov has long been an evangelist for teaching math and founded the Berkeley Math Circle as well as a local math olympiad for high school kids — but she says the standards for students at the country’s most elite public university have made its student a laughing stock.
She is one of thousands of faculty members who signed open letters earlier this year calling for the restoration of the SAT and ACT in admissions to ensure the best students are getting in.
Standardized testing was phased out by UC Berkeley in 2020 after then-college president Janet Napolitano — who was Homeland Security Secretary for President Barack Obama — overruled a task force that had called for the entrance exams to be kept.
Citing COVID pandemic disruptions and concerns over equity, testing was made optional later in 2020, with a court ruling subsequently requiring UC to become test-blind through 2025.
And that policy has had a deleterious effect on standards at UC Berkeley, Stankova said.
Berkley has one of the lowest acceptance rates of any public university in the country — admitting just 10.5% of applicants.
Stankova cited a diagnostic exam administered to Calculus I students before 2020, which showed 71% of students tested were “ready or nearly ready” to study calculus.
Just 0.14% of those tested between 2018 and 2020 tested below basic algebra.
But between 2021 and 2023, just 44% of students tested as “ready or nearly ready” to study calculus.
By 2022-23, more than one-third of calculus students were described as having severe math deficits, with zero being the most common score on the exam.
Stankova blamed the removal of standardized testing for hollowing out the quality of students, leaving her with two different classes of students in the lecture hall, one that is prepared to learn, and one that needs extremely remedial mathematics.
While other top colleges such as Harvard, MIT, Stanford, and Yale also suspended testing requirements during the pandemic, they have since reinstated them.
Stankova pointed out that UC has “moved in the opposite direction” to its peers, with no new admissions policy set to take effect before fall 2028.
“Students don’t have that kind of time: They attend college once,” she wrote.
UC-Berkeley did not respond immediately to requests for comment.
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