{"id":6728,"date":"2026-08-16T22:06:13","date_gmt":"2026-08-16T22:06:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/metrotransitreview.com\/?p=6728"},"modified":"2026-08-16T22:06:13","modified_gmt":"2026-08-16T22:06:13","slug":"uc-berkeley-math-prof-says-she-has-to-teach-fractions-to-calculus-students-because-standards-have-fallen-so-far","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/metrotransitreview.com\/?p=6728","title":{"rendered":"UC-Berkeley math prof says she has to teach fractions to calculus students because standards have fallen so far"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

A well known University of California-Berkeley mathematics professor has slammed admissions standards at the top-flight university \u2014 where she says huge portions of her students are failing to keep up with college calculus and she\u2019s forced to teach middle-school algebra and fractions students.<\/p>\n

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\u201cSome 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,\u201d wrote Zvezdelina Stankova, of UC Berkeley, in an op-ed piece on Saturday\u00a0for the San Francisco Standard.<\/p>\n

Stankova \u2014 who rose through the mathematics world to earn a PhD from Harvard after being born in communist Bulgaria \u2014 described the admissions process as \u201cless like careful evaluation and more like chance.\u201d<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 but she says the standards for students at the country\u2019s most elite public university have made its student a laughing stock.<\/p>\n

She is one of thousands of faculty members who\u00a0signed open letters earlier this year\u00a0calling for the restoration of the SAT and ACT in admissions to ensure the best students are getting in.<\/p>\n

Standardized testing was phased out by UC Berkeley in 2020 after then-college president Janet Napolitano \u2014 who was Homeland Security Secretary for President Barack Obama \u2014 overruled a task force that had called for the entrance exams to be kept.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

And that policy has had a deleterious effect on standards at UC Berkeley, Stankova said. <\/p>\n

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Berkley has one of the lowest acceptance rates of any public university in the country \u2014 admitting just 10.5% of applicants.<\/p>\n

Stankova cited a diagnostic exam administered to Calculus I students before 2020, which showed 71% of students tested were \u201cready or nearly ready\u201d to study calculus.<\/p>\n

Just 0.14% of those tested between 2018 and 2020 tested below basic algebra.<\/p>\n

But between 2021 and 2023, just 44% of students tested as \u201cready or nearly ready\u201d to study calculus.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\n<\/div>\n

While other top colleges such as Harvard, MIT, Stanford, and Yale also suspended testing requirements during the pandemic, they have since reinstated them.<\/p>\n

Stankova pointed out that UC has \u201cmoved in the opposite direction\u201d to its peers, with no new admissions policy set to take effect before fall 2028.<\/p>\n

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\u201cStudents don\u2019t have that kind of time: They attend college once,\u201d she wrote.<\/p>\n

UC-Berkeley did not respond immediately to requests for comment.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A University of California calculus professor has slammed standards at Berkeley, where she says she’s forced to teach middle-school-equivalent math to students.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6727,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6728","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-us-news"],"yoast_head":"\nUC-Berkeley math prof says she has to teach fractions to calculus students because standards have fallen so far - Metro Transit Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/metrotransitreview.com\/?p=6728\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"UC-Berkeley math prof says she has to teach fractions to calculus students because standards have fallen so far - 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