A prominent University of California, Berkeley mathematics professor is criticizing the school’s admissions standards, saying many students at the elite public university are arriving unprepared for college-level calculus and forcing instructors to revisit material as basic as fractions and middle-school algebra.
“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,” Zvezdelina Stankova, a UC Berkeley professor, wrote Saturday in an op-ed for the San Francisco Standard.
Stankova, who was born in communist Bulgaria before building a distinguished career in mathematics and earning a PhD from Harvard, argued that the university’s admissions process now feels “less like careful evaluation and more like chance.”
Long known as a passionate advocate for math education, Stankova founded the Berkeley Math Circle and a local math olympiad for high school students. But she said declining standards at one of the nation’s most prestigious public universities have left some Berkeley students struggling in ways that invite ridicule.
She is among thousands of faculty members who signed open letters earlier this year urging the University of California system to bring back the SAT and ACT in admissions, arguing that standardized tests help identify the strongest applicants.
UC Berkeley began moving away from standardized testing in 2020 after then-University of California President Janet Napolitano, who previously served as Homeland Security secretary under President Barack Obama, overruled a task force that had recommended keeping the entrance exams.
Later that year, citing disruptions from the COVID-19 pandemic and equity concerns, the university made testing optional. A subsequent court ruling required the UC system to adopt a test-blind policy through 2025.
Stankova said that shift has damaged academic standards at UC Berkeley, particularly in math, where she believes the effects are now showing up in the classroom.
Berkley has one of the lowest acceptance rates of any public university in the country — admitting just 10.5% of applicants.
Stankova cited a diagnostic exam administered to Calculus I students before 2020, which showed 71% of students tested were “ready or nearly ready” to study calculus.
Just 0.14% of those tested between 2018 and 2020 tested below basic algebra.
But between 2021 and 2023, just 44% of students tested as “ready or nearly ready” to study calculus.
By 2022-23, more than one-third of calculus students were described as having severe math deficits, with zero being the most common score on the exam.
Stankova blamed the removal of standardized testing for hollowing out the quality of students, leaving her with two different classes of students in the lecture hall, one that is prepared to learn, and one that needs extremely remedial mathematics.
While other top colleges such as Harvard, MIT, Stanford, and Yale also suspended testing requirements during the pandemic, they have since reinstated them.
Stankova pointed out that UC has “moved in the opposite direction” to its peers, with no new admissions policy set to take effect before fall 2028.
“Students don’t have that kind of time: They attend college once,” she wrote.
UC-Berkeley did not respond immediately to requests for comment.
