Berkeley math professor sounds alarm on liberal 'test-blind' policies, warns many students badly behind

A Berkeley mathematics professor is sounding the alarm that many students are woefully unprepared when they arrive at college because the University of California system's progressive "test-blind" policies have proven disastrous.

"Three days a week, I stand in front of lecture halls with 500 to 1,400 students.

By the second week of the semester, I already know who is in trouble," professor Zvezdelina Stankova wrote in a San Francisco Standard op-ed published Saturday .

"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," he said.

Stankova and thousands of faculty members across the 10 UC campuses have signed open letters urging the university system to reinstate the SAT and ACT in admissions.

Former UC president Janet Napolitano, who also served in the Obama administration, led the way in 2020 to phase out the standardized testing, in part out of "equity" concerns .

"Since then, admissions officers have been forbidden from considering the one standardized measure that provided a common academic benchmark across California’s thousands of high schools," Stankova wrote.

CAMPUS ANTISEMITISM EXTENDS BEYOND STUDENT PROTESTS AND INTO CLASSROOMS, ADL WARNS "After UC adopted test-blind admissions, the picture changed dramatically," she wrote.

Stankova laid out brutal data showing a sharp decline in student math readiness after UC stopped considering standardized tests.

From 2018 to 2020, 71% of roughly 2,200 tested Calculus I students were deemed ready or nearly ready, while just 0.14% tested below basic algebra.

Among roughly 2,800 students tested from 2021 to 2023 using a different diagnostic, only 51% were ready or nearly ready.

That fell to 44% in 2023, and a whopping 17% answered none of eight tested topics correctly.

"Those of us teaching such courses don’t experience the consequences as abstractions.