I have not read the whole report (too long for me late on a Wednesday night), but I’ve read a portion and the summary. What I find interesting, is that from the outset it mentions at least 4 factors: COVID Pandemic, grade inflation, removal of standardized testing, and steep increase in LCFF+ school enrollees at UCSD. It discusses the steep increase in students that are significantly underprepared in math, who need math for their major, between 2020 and 2025. And, this thread is littered with discussions about the need to bring SAT/ACT back for admissions, with little discussion of the COVID factor (a few mentions).
When I look at the chart on math 2 enrollment, it steadily climbs year after year from 2020 to 2025. If this is a lack of standardized testing problem, then why are the numbers so much worse in year 5 than in year 1 of no standardized testing?
It makes me wonder instead if the issue could actually be where in their math educational journey these students were when COVID hit in 2020 and they had to do zoom learning for a full year or more in many cases. Could it be that the 2021 cohort who only spent their senior year on zoom were less behind? And 2022, juniors, still had a decent foundation for zoom school? And, then 2023 and beyond where you get to early high school and middle school via zoom, those losses of basic skill building years in real school just compounded so that way more of them could not catch up and the numbers exploded? This seems more plausible to me than the removal of standardized testing in admissions being the cause of more unprepared math students. And if the COVID effects are in fact the driving factor in the meteoric rise in the number of unprepared math students they have (which I suspect they are), then might their current crisis be temporary, and subside once kids who did not have to endure prolonged zoom school (or at least not past some elementary school grade where catch up will have happened) are no longer the pipeline? H.S. Class of 2026 was in 6th grade when COVID hit. How many more classes would they expect before the effect starts to dramatically decline?
A second plausible theory to me is that the increase in LCFF+ students is highly correlated to the increase in unprepared math students, especially given the reality that those students on average were much more harshly impacted by zoom school than more well off students. And, UCSD is uniquely impacted by this in the UC system since they now have the highest number of LCFF+ students of any school in the UC system.
Now, I get that one could argue that bringing testing is a solution to the problem, and maybe it is. But the tenor in this thread was implying that removing testing was the cause of the problem (at least combined with grade inflation) while completely ignoring COVID’s accute impact on the era of students being measured.
For the record, I am against bringing testing back for a couple reasons. First, I am generally skeptical that institutions have the ability long term to keep the testing numbers in their proper perspective and use them as a floor (as someone suggested earlier in this thread) rather than a measure of relative excellence where they are reflexively disproportionately drawn to the highest scores. For UCSD’s acute math crisis I could probably temporarily get over that one. But, Second, and most importantly, at this particular moment, I think that bringing test scores runs a significant risk of artificially suppressing the number of Black and Latino students at highly selective schools. I say this because the federal government and certain litigious groups (but mostly I care about the government’s efforts) are closely scrutinizing admissions data exclusively by race, grades and test scores. And, if for any reason, the percentage of black or Latino students happen to go up without the test scores doing the same, that school will immediately be under scrutiny with serious financial risk. Even if, those students that year are exceptional candidates who just do not have the test scores to show it. Adding test scores back at this moment in history highly incentivizes enrolling less of these students in order to mitigate institutional risk.