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I teach calculus at Berkeley. Some of my students can’t do middle school math (sfstandard.com)
submitted 1 week ago by to c/academia@mander.xyz
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[–] 9 points 1 week ago (2 children)

How did these students get accepted to Berkeley then? Aren’t there entrance exams?

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  • [–] 8 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 child)

    because there is no requirement for passing a math test to get into Berkley. US higher ed has no entrance exams.

    students got passing grades in math coursework, sure, but that does mean they know how to do math, because schools don't teach it. same with reading and writing.

    high schools and education in general, is all about passing as many people as possible, it's not about rigorous educational standards and sorting.

    many students come from educational systems of varying quality, some of which were rigorous, some of which were not. and they won't know that until they get their ass kicked in higher education.

    and the administrators solution is to lower standards, because that's easier than having kids do remedial work.

    I got into Harvard. I got my ass kicked, because I was from a poor school and underprepared. I managed to work my way up from a C student freshman year, to a A student by Junior year. I had to re-learn grammar, algebra, and reading skills, but I was able to do it. Just because kids don't know it coming in doesn't mean they are not capable of learning it and succeeding.

    In my high school I was like top of my class and had 3.8 GPA. And freshman year while I was struggling and working my ass off to get Cs, there were people who barely worked who got As, because they had gone to elite private schools and had been taking college-level coursework for years already, who already had not only academic knowledge, but all the social elite entitlement, if they got anything less than an A they'd harass their professors to bump their grade, and I was terrified to even go to office hours to ask for basic help.

    A lot of students are also just entitled lazy assholes who refuse to learn and blame the professor/teacher.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    Whatever happened to the SAT test? My generation couldn’t get into a decent university without a respectable SAT score. Did universities decide enrollment money was more important than the school’s reputation?

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  • [–] 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

    SAT only tests for like middle school math. and it was dropped by a lot of places as a requirement to apply.

    SAT also is dumb, because all it really tests is how well you take the SAT. most rich kids just hire tutors to ace it. my own nephew upped his score by 200 points on it after his parents dropped $5K in SAT prep tutors. he is terrible at math, but he nailed the SAT. he's never taking calculus anyway and he hates math, but he has a B+ in calculus. like most people his age, he can't do arithmetic in his head, let alone algebra, because everything is on his phone and every tip he's paid at a restaurant is a button on a screen.

    It is not a measure of mathematical ability or knowledge in any way. The SAT tutors basically just teach you how to guess more quickly because the highest score comes not from knowing things, but answering the most amount of questions in the alloted time. It's a test of time management more than anything else.

    They used to have more advanced SAT subject tests, but those are no longer around. I took one that covered pre-calc, but that was 25 years ago. I had to submit SAT and three SAT subject tests for my college applications. I aced all those SAT tests. I still got my ass handed to me freshman year and almost failed out of freshman calculus. Basically freshman calclus was Calc 1 and 2 compressed into one semester and proof-focused... I had never seen a proof in my life... so yeah I barely passed because all I had been taught was calc 1 in terms of using algebraic equations. the exams for that class were basically asking us to derive proofs for principles of calculus...

    The truth is Calculus at bumfucksville HS is not the same as it as St John's Prep. And a college has a hard time accounting for that, and so do the students. So you have two students going into Calc 2 at uni, who have wildly different backgrounds, though they took the same coursework, technically. Hell I had friends who took AP calculus and then failed/struggled college calculus the next year...

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