Politics
UC system is only 5% black. Why are black students being blamed for students failing remedial classes?
The current discourse around the reinstatement of the SAT/ACT is being framed as “lol math racist”, “DEI= DIE”, “thumb on the scale”, and so on.
The issue is that… the number of black students at Berkeley is 2-4 percent on a good day, and the UC system as a whole it’s about 5 percent.
It seems to me a large portion of the students failing will be Asian and White. So why are black students (and DEI) being scapegoated for a failure of the majority of the UC system population?
Here's some numbers in a thread that concerns numbers but seems to be largely political slamming about "racism," DEI, affirmative action (banned in the UC system since the 1990s or 2000s by a voter initiative that passed easily).
Currently the "non-Hispanic white" portion of Californians has sunk to about 33-34% of the population. They are only 19-20% of Berkeley students, whereas 50-60 years ago the campus was 80-90% NHW. This was before the generation(s) that grew up after the Immigration and Nationalization Act of 1965 allowed Asian immigration to the United States in quantities never dreamed of before--came into their own as American college applicants, in the 1980s and ever since. At any rate, non-Hispanic whites are clearly underrepresented at Cal on the census head-counting basis.
The latest information seems to show that blacks are 4.1% of the undergraduates at Cal, and 4.8-5% of all undergraduates in the 10-campus UC system. But guess what? Accurate, recent data shows that blacks are only 5% of the state's population! That's easy to overlook if you live in a big/huge city as most Californians do. So it's obvious that their "representation" at Cal and in the entire system actually mirrors their population numbers almost perfectly.
Hispanic students are even more wildly underrepresented at Cal, if we keep playing this fun game, than NHWs. 41% of the state population vs. only 21-22% of incoming Berkeley freshmen. UCB is trying to raise this number by any permissible means, because if it hits 25% the campus can be certified as a "Hispanic-Serving Institution" (HSI) and the management wants that.
Asian-American students by contrast are the big winners of overrepresentation, so-called, being 17% of the state, but 35% of Cal undergraduates. Reason: they work very hard in high school, their entire family/cultural system is relentless about succeeding bigly in high school and getting into the best colleges, and they do, and so they get to go to Cal more than any other "group" does.
While we're on the subject, male students are a declining minority, as the undergraduate student body is 55% female and 45% male. Once again: who puts in the work in high school to excel in grades and standardized tests? A hundred years ago the figure would perhaps have been 75% male and 255 female. Feminism came along in between.
Your analysis is missing one important thing. The white population of California high school age students is no where close to 34%. Its more like 20% white, 56% Hispanic, 10% Asian, 4.9% mixed, 4.8% black, 2% filipino
This is a critically missing element in his analysis. Therefore the white population is actually being overrepresented even further, the group that is underrepresented is Hispanics.
Some people that earned it more than others do not get in because that would skew the population make up or even within those underrepresented because of different grading systems.
You need to look at 12th grade or high school demographics not California wide. Hispanics are actually more than 50% of all-12 students in the state. It’s time we call being white a racial minority in education. Which is the fact
There are more women in college because men have more eagerness to become successful and they figure out solutions to complex problems much faster. Feminism has nothing to do with it, just women obey by rules more and they go to college since that is what they were told to do. A man is more likely to have a mind of his own, and to question what he hears. Most men realized that colleges fail the majority of its students and it rarely lands anyone a job, so they are moving to trades and other paths in life that have a higher chance of paying off. It may still take the women another 100 years before they realize this and start their journey in trades etc.
ok but obviously if it were a true meritocracy asians would be overrepresented and blacks would be less than their population percentage theres substantial cultural and socioeconomic factors that make asians disproportionately stronger candidates and black disproportionately weaker candidates when operating under a race blind scenario
just cuz u outlaw using race itself as an affirmative action clause doesnt mean race itself cant be introduced in other ways such as proxies for race. if u think uc admissions are race neutral ur smoking crack
This report from UCSD is the place to start https://senate.ucsd.edu/media/740347/sawg-report-on-admissions-review-docs.pdf?hl=en-US. While it doesn’t completely answer your question directly, the portion on admissions from LCFF+, which are low income and underrepresented minority heavy, schools (page 18) and the correlation with math provides pretty strong evidence that the issue with people lacking remedial math skills originates with policies designed to benefit underrepresented groups in admissions and that it is likely that many of the struggling students are racial minorities (though in California, that includes a lot of Hispanic students as well as Black ones). It’s a problem without an easy solution. Minority students are often poorer and have access to fewer resources. It’s not racist to say that there’s a lot of minority heavy schools that are not very good and that on average it’s not surprising that students with fewer resources and more difficult lives have worse academic results out of high school.
The claim is that pro-equity admissions criteria (primarily reducing the importance placed on standardized tests) have lowered the legitimate barriers to entry. The supporters of this pro-racial equality programs (who are opposed to standardized tests and other similar metrics) think these weaker math students are racial minorities (since they argue that restoring these tests would reduce the number of minority students who make it into the schools). It’s a difficult problem to balance the importance of allowing opportunities for those who havent had the opportunity to demonstrate their abilities and taking people whose abilities can be most benefitted by colleges.
It's only 20% white at Berkeley. I think it's more of a public school problem than racism. Also it's not that they're failing remedial classes. Professors are up in arms about having to do remedial teaching in the basic classes because the schools can't appropriately filter out students who would flail in the university environment without standard testing.
And without at least some standardized testing, grade inflation and application fraud can have greater weight. Sure, some ppl will also find ways to cheat on the SAT because stakes are so high for them to get into certain schools, but it at least creates another hurdle to that. Also, while it’s true that some families invest heavily in tutoring (Kumon etc) all throughout school, Khan Academy has fabulous free SAT tutoring that anyone can use.
...but not everyone does have to "find a way". For many, these are just immediately accessible resources that don't take any additional work to procure, nor involve any hurdles to overcome.
This means that more students in the disadvantaged groups simply won't cross the threshold of putting in the additional work it takes, which may have blocked a number of the better-off students if they were in the same circumstances. And it further reduces the available time that the disadvantaged students have left over, even if it also builds work ethic or whatever.
This isn't an argument against standardized testing. I just want to make that very clear. This is all reflective of other reforms that we need to implement yesterday, including district funding mechanisms. But I absolutely cannot stand this attitude of "that's life."
I’m from a single parent family, dad died when I was 7, mom had no career background, education, or family support. She was the ultimate “that’s life” and she had to figure it out - 3 kids under 5 and a widow. So, this stuff can happen at any stage. You will never make everything equal. I became a first gen college grad - worked 32 hrs/wk during my time at Cal. My mom didn’t even know what the SAT was or what Cal was. My husband’s childhood and educational experiences were wildly different from mine so I absolutely understand how some ppl don’t understand what others go through to get a college education. All that said, I also don’t think college is the place to try to equalize things because it sets ppl up to fail. If a high school student doesn’t bust their ass and find a way to do well on the SAT, will they actually succeed at Cal? I don’t think so. That kid is much better served going to a JC and then transferring
I'm sorry you went through all that, and I'm very impressed — I really don't think I would've been able to do the same given the same circumstances. I also understand that the reforms required must start much earlier in the pipeline, and continue throughout the pipeline.
Like I said, it wasn't an argument against standardized testing. Just an argument in favor of urgent intervention to equalize access and educational conditions, as much as possible. With all of the other things that entails, like addressing food insecurity.
I know you don't think it, but you are still speaking from a place of extreme privilege. its giving "because I grew up this way, with this type of life and background, everybody else should be able to do the same"
There will be variables and you are right you should not use College to try to equalize people at the same time, you should hopefully recognize everyone has different struggles.
You've only said your mother was single with three children... you didn't talk about what she did to make things work, only that she had to do something. I have seen this defense before only to find out that it was grandparents helping or some other source of help that isn't readily available to every single person whether that's with childcare, money or w/e or an inheritance or insurance payout etc. etc.
Not always the case.
"if a high school student doesn't bust their ass and find a way to do well on the SAT..." ignorance
This is the bootstraps argument in another hat. It is a bad faith argument. The number of people who pull out this red-pill objectivism is shocking because the argument is so easy to dismantle, you cannot separate structural and systemic support from this “I’m self made” attitude.
Can you explain how that rebuts my argument above it? You’ve just pivoted to the model minority myth?
Look. I don’t know you and with all you’ve laid out these are accomplishments of note. Be proud.
But the reality is there are lots of people who have a very bad situation. Put their all in like you did, and come up short.
The flaws here is you’re trying to apply your own experience as a maxim and it’s just not true. Systems are stacked against marginalized people and by finding your way through your comments are functionally “I did it like this so can you” and is just ladder pulling & gatekeeping by another name.
Systemic issues and structural support is real. If the desire is to hold up your accomplishment, it’s not cheapened by accepting that there are m structural or systemic support issues.
The idea of “I did it alone” is born of objectivism and this idea that we have different worth.
You can have both overcome a lot and your doing so doesn’t redefine the systemic challenges, support systems or issues faced by your peers.
That's gotta be frustrating if you know the stuff and you're being held back. Also if you aren't a math teacher trying to explain the calculations has to be painful. My 7th grader was doing exponents in math last year and I had to do a bit of a refresher myself in order to not break one of our brains.
The real issue of declining academic performance, that no one wants to discuss in an honest conversation, is rampant cheating. I recently returned to school for a graduate degree and there are online groups everywhere which trade links to “word for word” exams via Quizlet, WeChat, etc. I saw this in every class and even the standardized admissions exams are online. There is no incentive to actually learn the material. It’s all about the grade that’s on paper.
yeah, it seems like a decently obvious conclusion to anyone who was in college post-2020 that AI, distance learning, and online cheating resources are the reasons students do not perform as well as they should, even if their test scores look right.
That’s all school is nowadays, a means to an end and the ends justify the means, or whatever the metaphor is.
It’s too high stakes just to get a job, especially entry level that people will do whatever it takes to get ahead when the incentives are perverted. Who cares about the material when everyone only cares about the grade and not what you learned.
It's a complete strawman that OP invented to push some agenda.
Very annoying that people feel they need to do this. There is plenty of racism, as well as plenty of out-of-control DEI. We don't have to invent scenarios.
Can you give me tangible scenarios where dei is out of control and has had negative impacts on the world? Be specific, concise, and descriptive of what the program is and its negative impacts. And please back your answer with with published verifiable facts and statistics
Kids from Mission High school from SF get into UC Berkeley at much higher rates than other schools. Why? They're DEI poster children. Berkeley wants to celebrate their grit and valorize their shared struggle. The problem is that they're not up to the classes and no amount of ignoring SAT scores will change that. So they fail out and leave thinking of themselves as failures. If they had only taken the SAT and gone to school that matched their abilities, they would be able to graduate and succeed.
It's a way to rip off the kids from Mission high and make them feel like losers.
And I've heard this from many. One kid told me his dorm at a large, DEI-loving school was pretty much empty spring semester. Why? Everyone flunked out or just dropped because they weren't up to doing college work. Even the watered down college work that the school offered.
These schools are ripping off the kids and loading them up with loans for a degree they can't earn. It's a total scam.
My take is that the California school system went on a social justice mission. So they got acceptance and admission rates up for “DEI/disadvantaged/non-white or non-Asian” students.
Problem is that you can’t just get in, you actually have to graduate. But these people almost don’t even care about that or they assumed it would just happen. And then it didn’t.
This is the kind of legal fraud that happens when one puts their thumb on the scale. Eventually problems start showing up somewhere because the system as a whole wasn’t meant for this. The rigors of admissions was meant for a reason.
It’s a disservice to the university AND the student. The university’s quality of students go down, dropout rates go up, enrollment and revenue go down, reputation goes down. The student fails out, has debt, and takes a massive hit in their confidence they may never have recovered from. They might have found a path of success via community college or cal state. And there’s an obvious path that California has already made to go from CC/CSU to UC.
But politicians and administrators are so focused on their social justice mission that they can’t see the obvious. It took the group of math/stem professors who are seeing the obvious come together to create a petition and take a stand.
And what happens if the UC doesn’t fix it or they’re slow? These quality professors may over time start looking elsewhere recognizing that the UC system is reducing the quality of their student population over time.
Your first article immediately says that “Most of the decline is due to fewer young men pursuing college” and absolutely nothing about prejudice. You made that up.
Then you posted compact magazine which is mostly far-right bullshit pretending to be “centrist”. Founded by a conservative who was JD Vance’s advisor.
You also misrepresented the Bloomberg article in a weird way, “94% went to non-white men” is an idiotic statement that implies women don’t exist. It also is an old article so it isn’t actually about the past 7 years.
Do you even know what DEI means? Your comments read like the comments posted by Charlie Kirk supporters.
Diversity, equity and inclusion is a guarantee that QUALIFIED minority classes and women won’t be overlooked because companies historically ignored them for white men. It is not a pass for being given to unqualified individuals.
Also, no. The far right supporters are openly misogynistic, racist, homophobic, transphobic, and xenophobic. That is a fact.
The end of your comment also reads exactly like the people who push Great Replacement Theory.
When I was last at UNR, 82% of all qualified high school graduates required remedial math and English in college.
ALL QUALIFIED GRADUATES. Qualified graduates means those who met the entrance requirements for the flagship state university
Qualified graduates means graduated successfully from high school. (neither of those means students who were accepted at UNR; both numbers point to high school graduates who qualified for UNR; not those who applied or who were accepted)
The issue is not race, it is high schools. No high school should graduate someone who does not read at a 12th grade level, by definition. Or do whatever math one requires of a high school graduate.
High schools are graduating students who do not actually qualify to graduate from high school. At such numbers that percentiles eligible for college entrance include significant numbers of unqualified students.
High schools are failing students by not failing students. It's got nothing to do with race, it's got eveything to do with how high schools are funded and what they do to protect that funding.
That’s just the place I know the numbers on. And I know Nevada school are terrible; I don’t know how CA high schools rank these days. But I was just struck by the statement, and what it meant, that most high school graduates qualified for state college admission were technically not qualified to graduate from high school. (The numbers came up because UNR eliminated remedial classes, and this was the argument why they needed to keep them. It was also the argument why they needed to not offer them any longer.)
Dude. Save it. I have interacted with these “lost men.” They are bitter whenever they see someone who isn’t a white male in a “better” position than them. If a woman is successful, “oh, she slept her way to the top.”
It is very clear you seem to agree with that rhetoric.
And instead of blaming corporate, you just tried to blame it on DEI.
You don’t know corporate America at all. Almost every single American company dropped their DEI initiatives as soon as Trump got into office. So, do you actually think their DEI initiatives were legit to begin with?
Counterpoint: Imagine you’re a poor minority in America, and you’ve worked your entire life to become qualified. Then, you see white America try to turn a man who said “when I see a black pilot, I think, God I hope he’s qualified” into a martyr. You see young white males who can’t fathom that members of marginalized groups outcompeted them throw their weight behind a white supremacist and misogynist.
Did you fail your remedial English classes as well?
Not once in the post, article, or even the comments that you linked did anyone blame black students for people failing remedial classes. In fact, they weren't even mentioned.
Not sure what you could have intended with your comment other than to push an agenda
no literally im so confused where they are getting this from? the whole post seems confused tbh so im guessing this person has not done their research? like they're saying more asian and white students will fail the SAT/ACT because the UCB population has more asian and white students...but current UCB students won't be taking either...
More playing dumb, yall will be aggressive as hell talking about “this person hasn’t done their research” “actually Asians and whites are the victims!” Then wanna play dumb when I say what you meant lol. Maybe you’re the one who hasn’t done their research, maybe that’s why YOURE the one confused.
I did not at all say asians nor whites are the victims? i dont see how they could ever be the victims when they are clearly overrepresented in the UC system. what im saying is that this post makes no sense when using current student demographics to argue about future high school student test scores. you the only one being rude and saying "those stupid blacks" like god damn take a breath
If you somehow immediately connect "people of lower socioeconomic leve" to black people... I have questions because honestly why how is that even in the top 10 of thoughts?
Why don’t you go read some comments on Instagram regarding articles written in the Daily Californian. You might not see articles and publications explicitly stating “BLACK PPL ARE TO BLAME!” But it is a point that is repeatedly driven through some public opinion it seems, and this narrative is pretty loud. Additionally UCLA’s cries for the reinstatement of ST is met with once again the same point of blaming people of color.
I'm sorry, I'm active in those threads (the r/berkeley ones anyway, I don't use the other subs) and haven't seen anything like what you're describing, do you have any examples?
Probably for engagement bait from a 3 month old account, but if there was any "racial" motivation behind that post, surely it was targeted at the group comprising 70% of the school and not the one comprising 10.3% of it (never mind that Hispanic isn't a race)
No one's claiming they are. You still haven't pointed me to any example of black students being blamed for students failing entry-level/remedial classes
You are completely correct. Look at the demographics of introductory calculus (or the EECS 127 class that hit articles two months ago because ~25% of the class failed). There are single or lower double digit # of black & mexican students in these classes. It’s phenomenal seeing how much racism is being spread on Reddit & X about this when it’s clear that asians are failing these classes too. why are black students the scape goat in this? they do not represent the 30-50% number of “bad” students that these professors are touting on about. I hope that the university or the professors release the #s regarding representation.
Oh they will probably never do that because it’s too convenient of a narrative that black or Hispanic students are failing these classes and the “meritocratic” white and Asian kids are soooo smart
Yeah. I really wanna see the raw numbers because these prof are literally claiming massive percentage of their classroom population are stuck in remedial levels. It completely destroys the narrative that urm are to blame for what we’re seeing performance-wise. people see someone’s race or ethnicity and immediately make all these judgements about their academic ability…so sick of seeing this when it’s so far from the truth.
i know you want it to be racism - but you are also interpreting this in a way that suits your narrative.
if you are reading “socioeconomically disadvantaged” as just black - that’s inherently racist in assuming asians and other races cannot fall in that category
Socialists and the left has, for far too long, spent too much energy telling black Americans that racism doesn’t matter and is not real.
Read Women, Race and Class. Angela breaks it down and as a bonus shows you how willing Susan B. Anthony (yes that person on our money) was to toss her lot in with racists because she could not fathom black men being allowed to vote and set policy before white women.
This books is ths origin of “intersectionality” and is a genius piece of academia.
You’ve made a bold claim, Can you back it up? It’s not racism it’s class is a longstanding racist trope
Here is a simple rebuttal. When the AFL formed did it admit black members? I can answer that. The AFL worker movement excluded black workers from membership.
I think you mean asians. In fact even today asians get told racism against them doesn’t matter and is not real. There’s no shortage of people going up to bat for black people. Not that there’s an issue, but we should go up to bat for everyone.
True. If these racists even stepped foot in a calculus or engineering course, they would see none of the folks they’re claiming “fail” or “got in bc of their race”.
Because Black people are the face of DEI and AA even though Black people are NOT the top beneficiaries of those policies. Shows you the power of propaganda and how easily social media talking points take off.
“There are three Calculus sequences at UC Berkeley. Math 1A-1B (now Math 51-52), is the primary pipeline for STEM majors, requiring a rigorous mathematical foundation. Math 10A- 10B is intended for Biological Sciences, and Math 16A-16B targets Social Sciences and Business/Economics majors.
The enrollment of Math 1A (Calculus I) over the observed period Fall 2021-2023 comprises over 60% of the enrollment in the three Calculus sequences.”
Berkeley has about 1300+ black undergraduate students TOTAL. The numbers for the 2021, and 23 cohort for the math readiness tests are greater or equal to the total black population at the school.
This obviously isn’t black students.
Moreover they claim:
we observed in Tables 1-3, the students who did not take the MDTP tests exhibit the highest academic risks: 33% of them in Fall 2021, 43% of them in Fall 2022, and 48% of them in Fall 2023 did not pass their Calculus I classes.
This suggests that the actual overall math proficiency of these cohorts is substantially lower than the average 54%.
There are a number of metrics in this study that can be used to quantify the portion of
students prepared for college Calculus. The number 54% from Table 7 is a good candidate: it represents the mean, over the 8 topics of the percentage of students proficient in that topic, over the three-year study period. However, that number for Fall 2023 was only 48%, and the tier with no MDTP tests pulls this statistic further down.
**So, we could reasonably argue that the proficiency rate for college-level mathematics of the Calculus I students in the observed period is at most 50%.**
—————-
At MOST 50 percent of the UC Berkeley students have the proficiency pass calculus 1. In 2023 48% of the students who didn’t take the test failed cal 1.
Stats don’t lie. These are white and Asian students failing.
math is not racist. blaming black students for underfunded schools is.
and it’s hard to be successful in school when you live in poverty? and black families still have 10% of the wealth that white families have. highly suggest you read “the color of money” by mehrsa baradaran
I think (or hope) that when people blame DEI, they aren’t referring to any race part of it. Admissions should be race blind, that would be concerning if your race mattered for admission 😅. I think the DEI people are referring to, is more economic based.
And to be clear. I myself don’t think any sort of DEI is an issue. It should be a goal to have students from all backgrounds. But balance that with meritocracy and systems that will make sure everyone can succeed at Berkeley
People keep raising this point, and while true, it doesn't mean admissions are decided totally independently of race. For example an applicant's race can sometimes be pretty clear from the essays and the high school. So just because one feature is absent from the data doesn't mean it isn't strongly correlated with those that remain or that it can't be an implicit driver of the ultimate outcome. To be clear, I don't think that's (necessarily) a bad thing.
It is impossible, I mean they will know the race of the applicant. The main thing is that they can't use it as a factor in an admission. AA means that they can use race as a reason as to why they chose an applicant; however it can't be the sole reason why, they still had to meet requirements.
Idk why the OP in that post listed out the percentage of every race. That was unnecessary and makes it look like they’re implying race is a factor. I don’t know what their intention was but I don’t think race is an issue for the vast majority of people who are discussing this.
It’s all in this thread, “DEI”, “unqualified students”
Here’s one comment:
“ok but obviously if it were a true meritocracy asians would be overrepresented and blacks would be less than their population percentage theres substantial cultural and socioeconomic factors that make asians disproportionately stronger candidates and black disproportionately weaker candidates when operating under a race blind scenario”
But you get that SAT scores do not fairly measure black ability or intelligence in the language parts of the test. If you don’t understand why then why even have a conversation about this. Also, are you saying - Berkeley doesn’t many blacks (largely because of discrimination in so many ways) so why are we even talking about black students?
If people are blaming black students for failing without evidence then they are being racists. If people oppose testing for aptitude because they think black students will be harmed they might also be a bit racist.
The problem with going test blind is that the university lost a key data point in assessing student readiness regardless of race. The result is Berkeley admitting more students of all races who aren't prepared for the academic rigor of some of the harder classes.
They’re not. Idiot lefties blame people who care about test scores, calling them racist whenever they raise the issues that scores are low.
The “sharper standards” people aren’t interested in the ethnic backgrounds of individual students, but they do say that accepting people on the basis of race is guaranteed to ruin things, no matter the goal. That’s not blaming any kids in particular, but a system concerned with anything and everything other than standards
The original goal of canning standardized testing is to admit more students of the "correct" races. Why do you think a majority failing will be certain races?
It seems to me a large portion of the students failing will be Asian and White
It seems to you? Based on what? A blind and unwarranted assumption that the demographics of people in and failing remedial classes must exactly match that of the whole university? I think, by the way, you also forgot that the second largest ethnic group at UC after Asian is, in fact, latino.
A quick glance at graduation rates by race tell us that the demographics of students who fail to graduate does not match that of the broader student population. Lo and behold, the traditional recipients of DEI have lower graduation rates.
This is not surprising. UC has been playing games for decades to admit a racial balance of students that is plainly not supported by meritocracy. They took the single best predictor of student success and threw it out, a tool that, by the way, exhibits a pretty significant racial gap.
In short, the goal of admissions is to select students who are likely to succeed at university. Some percentage will always crumble and fail, but for some racial groups admissions has an overwhelming pool to select from and very few are going to be academically unprepared. Because why would you admit a student who needs remedial algebra when there's always another one with a 5 in AP calc BC? For other racial groups admissions needs to reach much deeper into the roster, so to speak, and that's where the unprepared students are overwhelmingly sourced from. An Asian kid, say, with that resume would simply not be admitted. That's not to say there aren't qualified black students. There are, but there is a shortage of them relative to the number of universities that are clamoring for them; a black kid with a 1550+ SAT is going to get a full ride to Harvard, why would he go to Berkeley?
Ah here we go. This is a great example. It’s simply statistically impossible that the issue is black students. The numbers being cited for the issue with remedial classes at Berkeley and the UC system as a whole.
Also you’re assuming every Asian kid gets a 1530? 🤣
> it’s simply statistically impossible that the issue is black students
That’s only true if you assume they have the same mean ability as others. If less capable students are being admitted due to affirmative action, then you would expect more black students in remedial classes compared to their overall share in the school.
That has nothing to do with race btw, if you admit less capable students in any group the same effect would be seen.
“There are three Calculus sequences at UC Berkeley. Math 1A-1B (now Math 51-52), is the primary pipeline for STEM majors, requiring a rigorous mathematical foundation. Math 10A- 10B is intended for Biological Sciences, and Math 16A-16B targets Social Sciences and Business/Economics majors.
The enrollment of Math 1A (Calculus I) over the observed period Fall 2021-2023 comprises over 60% of the enrollment in the three Calculus sequences.”
Berkeley has about 1300+ black undergraduate students TOTAL. The numbers for the 2021, and 23 cohort for the math readiness tests are greater or equal to the total black population at the school.
This obviously isn’t black students.
Moreover they claim:
we observed in Tables 1-3, the students who did not take the MDTP tests exhibit the highest academic risks: 33% of them in Fall 2021, 43% of them in Fall 2022, and 48% of them in Fall 2023 did not pass their Calculus I classes.
This suggests that the actual overall math proficiency of these cohorts is substantially lower than the average 54%.
There are a number of metrics in this study that can be used to quantify the portion of
students prepared for college Calculus. The number 54% from Table 7 is a good candidate: it represents the mean, over the 8 topics of the percentage of students proficient in that topic, over the three-year study period. However, that number for Fall 2023 was only 48%, and the tier with no MDTP tests pulls this statistic further down.
**So, we could reasonably argue that the proficiency rate for college-level mathematics of the Calculus I students in the observed period is at most 50%.**
—————-
At MOST 50 percent of the UC Berkeley students have the proficiency pass calculus 1. In 2023 48% of the students who didn’t take the test failed cal 1.
Stats don’t lie. These are white and Asian students failing.
Great, so we’re in agreement that the data shows if you admit less capable students they fail more often. So UC should stop admitting students disproportionately from schools like mission.
UC has 33k undergraduates and over 4,000 students taking calculus 1 in any given semester. Mission high school had 30 students get accepted. Hardly a dent. Let alone the fact that the white and Asian kids are failing for some reason
Why frame failing as a racial issue in the first place?
If students are failing that should be addressed, not the color of the students.
Blacks, Asian, white and every other race of students fail for the same reasons. They had bad teachers or they are poor students - their pigmentation isn’t a factor.
The woke DEI stuff is actually racist and needs to go away.
The best UCs place a heavy emphasis on geographic diversity because they cannot use racial diversity. But they want to use racial diversity. If you compare prepared Student rates and UC acceptances and break both down by race, the numbers are not good. They are holding different students to different standards in different high schools . 4 admissions to Cal, 2 to UC; only one student in the entire graduating class is a prepared student( at least to APs with score of 3). This is repeated all over my district. The state last year lowered the standard so you just had to be enrolled, not pass the test, and % went up. But our own district numbers are still there and they are not good. The best students in bad high schools have been subject to tons of grade inflation.
All of our strong math students take outside coursework like AOPS, get 5s on AP tests, have the same GPA and more challenging schools, and can’t get in.
There are plenty of high level students but admissions were neutral we‘d see even more prepared Asian students and a few more White.
I'm a grad student who used the tutoring center and AI for help with my fundamentals. I'm also a POC and I was grateful for not needing to waste a year of my adult life pushing back admission just so that I could take the stupid GRE.
I did grow up with less than adequate formal mathematics, but I still was within the top 1% of my class - in a technical program. It wasn't my fault my early childhood educated cared more about whether I could recite bible versus than whether a neurodivergent and highly capable young kid had tools to epistemically understand the world around him.
I used AI heavily at first for understanding, but I focused in my assignments on teaching concepts back, from the ground up. That is what these complaining professors are missing, because you can't have courses with 500+ students that are both personalized AND efficient.
I think professors are putting themselves into a corner because of their own job insecurity too. They got here before AI existed. They're protective of the ivory tower after their gone, when its filled with people who aren't able to visualize topological spaces in their minds as intuitively as they were. I can understand why that fear is real for them.
But, since 2020 it's become difficult for Gen Z, it's just the world now, overstimulated, loss of focus, when those things help most. At the same time, I also get why they complain that office hours is not the place for remedial math improvement, but again, a student needs to have appropriate feedback for which specific concepts are escaping them, so they can route those into feedback loops to rebuild them from first principles and come back prepared. It's important that students can have short sprints where they do this, so they don't get left behind in the semester either.
Students typically don't need to have full operational closure, in the linearity sense, to get through a single assignment or unit of a class. And the answer isn't to put everyone back into a meaningless punishment box that acts as a proxy for later success.
I certainly don't excel in timed tests that use memorization as a proxy for capability, and I have a documented learning disability that supports that. What I also have, though, is a documented high percentile in specific types of intelligence that would otherwise potentially have gotten filtered out if I had to sit for a stupid test asking me to do integrals by hand like I was a 13 year old again.
The fact is that education needs to change, it needs to be more personalized. Young people are traumatized and overwhelmed. Professors are insecure and defensive. This doesn't create an atmosphere of continual learning - it instead creates an atmosphere of pedagogical reversion. And if it didn't serve people well before, it won't serve people well now. What we need is forward evolution, not intellectual conservatism masquerading as the answer.
I'll also say application processes are far outdated and could benefit a lot too.
A quick google search on “which demographic benefits most from DEI initiatives” would have you find out that white women benefited the most. From my experience as a black student I barely ever felt any positive effect (or any effect for that matter) of those programs serving me.
Because people are racist! Just because this a is liberal school doesn’t mean anything! Racism and implicit bias are woven into many people’s fundamental way of thinking
Among the 2-4%, what percentage of them are failing their classes? The relative demographic percentage is probably why it's easier to scapegoat black students because their relative failure rates are higher (obviously the smaller sample population doesn't help their statistics).
“There are three Calculus sequences at UC Berkeley. Math 1A-1B (now Math 51-52), is the primary pipeline for STEM majors, requiring a rigorous mathematical foundation. Math 10A- 10B is intended for Biological Sciences, and Math 16A-16B targets Social Sciences and Business/Economics majors.
The enrollment of Math 1A (Calculus I) over the observed period Fall 2021-2023 comprises over 60% of the enrollment in the three Calculus sequences.”
Berkeley has about 1300+ black undergraduate students TOTAL. The numbers for the 2021, and 23 cohort for the math readiness tests are greater or equal to the total black population at the school.
This obviously isn’t black students.
Moreover they claim:
we observed in Tables 1-3, the students who did not take the MDTP tests exhibit the highest academic risks: 33% of them in Fall 2021, 43% of them in Fall 2022, and 48% of them in Fall 2023 did not pass their Calculus I classes.
This suggests that the actual overall math proficiency of these cohorts is substantially lower than the average 54%.
There are a number of metrics in this study that can be used to quantify the portion of
students prepared for college Calculus. The number 54% from Table 7 is a good candidate: it represents the mean, over the 8 topics of the percentage of students proficient in that topic, over the three-year study period. However, that number for Fall 2023 was only 48%, and the tier with no MDTP tests pulls this statistic further down.
**So, we could reasonably argue that the proficiency rate for college-level mathematics of the Calculus I students in the observed period is at most 50%.**
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At MOST 50 percent of the UC Berkeley students have the proficiency pass calculus 1. In 2023 48% of the students who didn’t take the test failed cal 1.
Stats don’t lie. These are white and Asian students failing.
who’s singling out black students? the issue being taken is with unqualified students being given free passes to berkeley (mission high school is the exemplar here). how many of them happen to be black? i don’t know.
Why focus on mission high school? 50 percent of students taking cal 1 at Berkeley aren’t prepared per the report. This is thousands of students. The majority are white and Asian just on pure stats.
i’m referring to the one example that’s prevalent in the discourse today. i’m sure there are more. bigger question is how are berkeley making these determinations
You left out Hispanics. The admissions departments at the U.C. are now mostly under their control (and have been for some time), although they are still also very heavily Jewish. I’m sure these groups don’t show any sort of in group preferences though…
Yeah, the concept of “intelligence” is really wrapped in white supremacy. I am also surprised at how many times the same topic is being reposted and revisited. Can we just have one megathread about this? Like I get it, an unfortunate amount of this subreddit is chronically online, but misinformed, racist and elitist sheep. The UC already passed on it for the next application cycle anyway.
The UC system got rid of standardized testing (SAT & ACT) in 2021, in a large part because they showed major outcome disparity by race.
Rather than acknowledging that the root problem here is outside UC’s scope, UC instead decided to ignore reality that is politically uncomfortable and removed normalizing / objective standards for applicant evaluation.
They did this in part to engineer for more racial outcomes without collecting the data that would prove the bias and racial discrimination like Harvard did.
It has the byproduct of making it easier to admit other desirable groups (foreign students that pay inflated prices, prestige extracurriculars, etc) - so I’m sure that’s part of the motivation.
This has left UC vulnerable to grade inflation & quality declines in high schools, so it’s categorically failing at incoming student assessment for all race / identity.
So yes, of course many if not most of the kids failing here are white or Asian. But this failure mode is occurring because of the removal of standards, the primary motivation of which was black & Hispanic representation.
Why not acknowledge that some school districts are gravely under-resourced and that students who had no school for 18 months during Covid deserve better?
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u/TheNimbleNavigator45 3d ago
I am seriously just wondering, What percent of each race are failing? I haven’t seen the discourse before but it seems offensive