One of my favorite subjects at school became maths but not until after grade 9 when I was able to choose the subjects I studied each year. (There were no options up until then.) In fact,’General Mathematics’ was one of the five subjects I took in year 12 for my higher school certificate exams, the standardized tests held statewide and used by universities to determine admissions.
At that time (and still today) I didn’t really know what I wanted to be when I grew up but for a while I dabbled with the idea of becoming an actuary. Working in a dusty Dickensian office with numbers and predicting the life spans of others, seemed like a fun way of spending my waking hours. But sadly not all dreams come true.
As a failed actuary, my interest was recently piqued when I read about the open letter penned by five professors, four math and one law, at the University of California (UC) Berkeley calling on leadership to bring back mandatory math testing for STEM majors because they were tired of teaching students middle school and high school math skills.
I’d missed the memo that during COVID, UC and many others colleges banned the use of SAT and ACT test scores to help determine student admissions. And although many colleges have now reinstated test score requirements, all ten UC campuses have not.
They still mostly rely on high school grade point averages (GPAs) to determine who to admit but because of rampant grade inflation, the practice of assigning higher grades than a student would otherwise deserve, many of the students being admitted have rudimentary if any math skills.
Nationally, over 60% of grades awarded in high schools are all A’s these days, up from 25% twenty years ago. And just over the past decade, the number of students applying to the UC system with straight A’s went from 52,989 in 2015 to 103,000 in 2025. Curiously, while high school GPAs are skyrocketing, scores on national standardized tests have remained flat or declined. So students in America aren’t really getting smarter.
In a recent opinion editorial in the San Francisco Standard, professor Zvezdelina Stankova, one of the original authors of the open letter, wrote:
“I teach mathematics at UC Berkeley. 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. 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.”
At UC Berkeley, at least 20% to 30% of first-semester calculus students showed severe preparation deficits on diagnostic exams. Meanwhile, UC San Diego documented a 30-fold increase between 2020 and 2025 in incoming freshmen testing below high school math levels
The experience in California is corroborated by the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress test that found 45 percent of 12th grade students fell into the “below basic” category for math, worse than any previous assessment. Scores declined across all percentiles except for the highest-performing students. The achievement gap between the highest- and lowest-performing 12th-grade math students is wider now that it has ever been.
That is why more than 1,450 faculty members across the UC campuses, including five Nobel laureates, signed-on to support the open letter calling for the return of ACT / SAT scores.
Nevertheless, support is far from unanimous as some math faculty believe it won’t fix the underlying issue and say it’s up to high schools to do a better job preparing students. Additionally, critics of standardized tests say that the exams are biased (aka racist) in favor of affluent students.
Meanwhile, Colorado requires third to eleventh grade students, each spring, to sit standardized Colorado Measures of Academic Success (CMAS) tests. But only students in grades three through eight take math assessment tests.
As an aside, CMAS testing cost us $18.3 million in state funding and $2.2 million in federal funding to administer each year, in case you were curious.
In some school districts fewer than half the students sit the tests because parents are allowed to opt them out. Some parents distrust results too. It also takes a lot of time as students can spend as much as eleven hours over multiple days taking CMAS tests.
Nonetheless, of the eighty to ninety percent of eighth grade Colorado students who took the math test this year, some 37.8% met or exceeded expectations, a 3.1% increase over 2025, the largest year over year increase of any grade level in the state.
Is this a result we Coloradans should be proud of?
I’m must acknowledge that I’m not.
