The number of first-year students at the University of California, San Diego, whose math skills fall below a middle school level has increased nearly 30-fold over the past five years, according to a new report from the university’s Senate–Administration Working Group on Admissions. In the 2025 fall cohort, one in eight students placed into math below a middle school level, despite having a solid math GPA.

The number of first-year students in remedial math courses at the university surged to 390 in fall 2022, up from 32 students in fall 2020. The remedial math course was designed in 2016 and only addressed missing high school math knowledge, but instructors quickly realized that many of their students had knowledge gaps that went back to middle or elementary school, the report states. For fall 2024, UC San Diego revamped its remedial math course to address middle school math gaps and introduced an additional remedial course to cover high school math. In fall 2025, 921 students enrolled in one of these two courses—11.8 percent of the incoming class.

“This deterioration coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects on education, the elimination of standardized testing, grade inflation, and the expansion of admissions from under-resourced high schools,” the report states. “The combination of these factors has produced an incoming class increasingly unprepared for the quantitative and analytical rigor expected at UC San Diego.”

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Within the UC system, the San Diego campus isn’t alone, but its problem is “significantly worse,” the report states. This is partly because the university has, since 2022, admitted and enrolled more students from low-income schools that saw greater COVID-era learning loss than other UC campuses. Many other UC campuses are seeing similar, though smaller, declines in student preparation. About half of UC campus math chairs responded to a survey saying that the “number of first-year students that are unable to start in college-level precalculus” increased twofold between fall 2020 and fall 2025, and the other half said the number increased threefold.

High school grade inflation is not helping the university evaluate students’ math skills, the report states. In 2024, the average high school math GPA for students in Math 2, the middle school–level remedial math course, was 3.65—an A-minus.

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The working group put forward a number of recommendations for addressing these shortcomings, including using a “math index” based on historical placement data and transcript-based variables to “predict students’ likelihood of placement into remedial math.” The group also recommended establishing feedback mechanisms with high schools and requiring math placement testing by June 1 for incoming students, among other things.

The report is here.

They also call for the UC system to return to using standardized testing for admissions.

This recommendation follows directly from the findings in the report that high school math grades are only very weakly linked to students’ actual math preparation.

Since that’s not up to UC San Diego, they recommend introducing a “Math Index” that takes into account other factors to predict student preparedness. They say it’s essential to include the high school attended as one input. An implication is that some students would be penalized based on their high school.

Using the SAT to judge individual performance certainly seems fairer.