When grades stop meaning anything

The UC San Diego math scandal is a warning

If you never felt this way in math class but managed to pull straight A grades anyway, you are either a genius or were robbed of an education. (Photo by Ridofranz/iStock via Getty Images)

The question that captured the world’s attention was 7 + 2 = [_] + 6. There’s no trick; it’s as easy as it looks. The answer is 3.

The question was posed to students in the University of California San Diego’s (UCSD) fast-growing remedial math class, Math 2, and one-quarter of them got it wrong, according to a UCSD Senate-Administration Workgroup on Admissions report.

UCSD, one of the country’s best public universities, has offered remedial math for nearly a decade — but lately, the share of students requiring it has skyrocketed. In the fall of 2020, 32 students took Math 2. In the fall of 2025, fully 1,000 students had math placement scores so low they would need it.¹

In fact, many of the students didn’t just need remedial high school math — their scores indicated they needed remedial middle school or even elementary school math. Only 39% of the students in the remedial class knew how to “round the number 374518 to the nearest hundred.”

Reviewing test results like these, you would expect transcripts full of Cs, Ds, or even failing grades. But alarmingly, these students’ transcripts did not even reflect profound struggles in math. Mostly, they were students whose transcripts said they had taken advanced math courses and performed well.

“Of those who demonstrated math skills not meeting middle school levels,” the report found, 42% reported completing calculus or precalculus. “The pattern of high school math classes taken in many cases suggests much higher levels of math skill than the actual math skill the student often has.”

The students were broadly receiving good grades, too: More than a quarter of the students needing remedial math had a 4.0 grade point average in math. The average was 3.7. In fact, the report found that on average, student grades in 2025 rose compared to those of students admitted in 2020.

Instead, here is the absurd image that the report slowly and painstakingly paints: A number of high schools are awarding A grades to AP Calculus students who do not have any calculus skills and who would get the lowest possible score on the AP Calculus exam if they took it.

Trying to understand how this happened, I talked to some high school math teachers.

“I have taught AP Calc in circumstances that produced this kind of result,” one public school high school math teacher told me. “No one can do fractions.”²

The students are missing so many prerequisites that teaching them calculus is basically hopeless. And indeed, almost all of them fail the AP Calculus exam at the end of the year.

“My exam results when I was teaching it were mostly: One student (who actually has most of the prerequisite skills) gets a five and maybe one more ekes out a three and everyone else gets ones and twos,” the teacher told me. “I wasn’t allowed to grade in a way that would hold them accountable.”

“What would happen,” I asked, “if you did grade based on their actual mastery of calculus?”

“If I was failing all the kids who weren’t doing on-level work, that would be almost all,” she told me. “The kids would all be trying to drop the class to preserve their GPAs, because that is the set of kids that cares about class rank. And if all the kids drop, they just won’t run the class at all.”

I hope by now you are a tenth as infuriated on behalf of these students as I am. Because let’s recap: These students attend public schools. They work hard; they care about their class rank; they get good grades.

“The ones who have been top all the way through have no reason to think they aren’t ready,” the math teacher told me. After all, they get an A every year. Doesn’t that mean they have mastered the material? But it doesn’t.

Instead, year after year, they fall farther behind, and it becomes more and more impossible for any teacher to admit that the students cannot do math and grade accordingly — since that would ruin the kids’ GPAs and college prospects. In this manner, they may make it all the way to college before they find out that they can only do math at a middle-school or sometimes an elementary-school level.

Until recently, the “reality check” that these kids have been denied an adequate math education for the past 10 years would come when they turned in very poor scores on the SAT and ACT. They would not have made it into a university like UCSD, which is one of the top-ranked and most selective public universities in the country.

Yet in 2020, the UC system eliminated the requirement for the SAT and ACT for admissions against the advice of the Academic Senate’s Standardized Testing Task Force. In 2021, the system made that policy permanent, citing worries that the tests are biased against disadvantaged students and making the (factually false) claim that they don’t help predict success in college.

Since then, the number of students in UCSD remedial math has surged from 32 to nearly one thousand, the UCSD report found. However, the report made it clear that the university was not — and still is not — well equipped to serve them.

So many students have needed remedial math in the last two years that there haven’t been enough classes for all of them and hundreds went unplaced. Perhaps this would all be acceptable if remedial college math could make up for years of underperformance. But even for students who are placed in the remedial classes, the outcomes are not good.

The most common majors selected by the students taking remedial math are biology and psychology. Psychology BS majors and biology majors require college-level calculus, and students typically take UCSD’s calculus classes 10A and 10B.

But the report found that students coming from remedial math struggle in these classes, even after they’ve taken all the remedial coursework the university can offer: Between 2017 and 2023, 24% of these students earned a D, F, or withdrew from 10A. Of those who went on to 10B, 30% earned a D, F, or withdrew.

Also, while you might imagine that most UCSD students who need remedial math are strong in other subject areas, increasingly, the same students also need remedial writing: “two out of five students with severe deficiencies in math also required remedial writing instruction.”

Even with a year of remedial classes, the university is only able to get some of these students in a position to succeed even at the fairly minimal math requirements for their most common intended majors. It’s too early for there to be evidence on whether these groups of students needing extreme remediation will graduate on time or at all, but I would not bet on it.

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Now, a lot of people keep misreading this story, and I want to make a few things clear:

1. This is not just about COVID-19 or phones in classrooms or whatever your pet bogeyman is.

Some people took the rapid decline in math competence at UCSD to be just a particularly well-documented example of a phenomenon occurring everywhere: student performance slumping in the aftermath of COVID disruptions and school closures.

This phenomenon is definitely real — standardized test scores are looking ugly — but what’s going on at UCSD is not typical. Other UC schools have seen a two or threefold increase in underprepared students, not a thirtyfold increase.

This is about UCSD’s admissions process and, in particular, the perfect storm created by massive grade inflation and the ban on standardized test scores. These allow admissions to be dominated by students with good grades in advanced classes who did not actually learn the needed material.

2. This is about the UC system.

I’ve seen a massive disconnect in how this story has been discussed in California and outside California. Californians take enormous pride in the UC system, one of the crown jewels of the state. We have hands-down many of the best public universities in the world, and we feel quite strongly that you can drop the qualifier “public” and the claim stays true.

I sincerely believe that UC Berkeley, UCLA, and UC San Diego will offer you as good an education as Harvard, Yale, or Stanford — and, if you’re a California resident, they will do it for a reasonable price. I’ve seen some non-Californians say “Why is it a big deal if universities have to offer several years of remedial math? Don’t we want universities to do that?”

My answer is emphatically yes, we do want universities to do that. Any student of any age can go learn anything they want at a community college. There’s also the California State University system, with more accessible admissions standards.

But we also want the UCs to remain world-class research universities. There is a trade-off between a math department’s ability to offer more than a thousand students remedial elementary and middle school math and its ability to offer future STEM majors the advanced math classes they need.

“Few, if any students who place into Math 2 have successfully completed an engineering degree,” the report noted. That might be fine if those students don’t want to pursue STEM, but they aren’t particularly prepared for non-STEM coursework either.

California has already committed to a pathway for higher education for everyone — accessible community colleges and top-tier research universities. If we try to make the top-tier universities also serve the function of community colleges, we will destroy both.

3. These students are not lazy or dumb.

OK, I’m sure some of them are — I was pretty darn lazy during college myself. But I think it’s important to emphasize that many students in this boat are, in fact, smart kids. They are kids at the top of their class at large public high schools, kids who sought out honors track classes, worked hard in them, and got As in them.

I feel pretty confident that if we had actually allowed them to fail earlier, thereby providing them with an adequate education during middle and high school, they would, in fact, be prepared to excel in college.

These kids were not doing anything wrong. They were lied to. They were told that they were prepared for classes they were not prepared for. They were told that they were excelling in classes that they were not excelling in. They deserved better.

It’s important to frankly discuss how bad this situation is, but it need not and should not take the form of blaming students or assuming that they must be stupid or unworthy in some way. I think these “blame the student” takes hold sway out of some kind of just-world fallacy.

We don’t want to believe that the system could be so catastrophically bad as to fail even smart and hardworking kids. But yes, it absolutely can.

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Where do we go from here?

Cargo cult equity needs to die. I am a true believer in the power of education. Not all kids are equally smart, and some kids start at a significant disadvantage due to life circumstances. But all kids are capable of learning a great deal if schools can accomplish a few goals:

1. Tailor their teaching to what students have the prerequisite skills to master

2. Earn students’ trust that the material is worth mastering

3. Get students as much practice as they need (which, for some kids, is a ton)

Education can be an enormously powerful tool for combatting injustice.

But it makes me really angry when schools try to skip over the hard work of teaching students to be successful by just awarding them A grades and advancing them forward even if they have not mastered the material.

To the high schools engaged in this fraud: It might temporarily make your statistics on how many students from disadvantaged backgrounds are taking calculus look a little better, but ultimately, it is an injustice to the very kids you’re claiming to help.

You are wasting their time in math classes that they are not ready for. You are setting students up for failure at universities that assume your graduates have prerequisite knowledge they don’t, in fact, have. And you are potentially causing students to waste time and money.

The aim of equity is not to brag about how many students of a target background you awarded an A in calculus, it’s to ensure that every student actually learns.

Furthermore, to the parents reading this: Your child’s good grades may mean nothing. Parents, understandably, tend to assume that if their kid is getting A grades, that means they are learning. I am here to deliver bad news: it doesn’t. It is very possible that your child who is bringing home straight As is catastrophically behind in one or more subject areas.

I have heard stories from parents whose kids were getting As in language arts and could not fluently read. I have heard from parents whose kids were getting As in math, then failed a placement test and learned that their school had simply not bothered to cover a significant portion of the curriculum.

This is infuriating. It is outrageous. I feel reluctant to even discuss it without a plan for what to do about it, because whenever I discuss it with parents, they become stressed out and want advice on what to do next.

But it’s the truth. The only advice I can offer is this: Get angry. This system isn’t going to change unless someone demands it.

1. In fall 2020, 32 students took Math 2, which was originally designed to cover high school-level math, and 22 went unplaced. As the years went on, Math 2 was redesigned to cover elementary school-level math, while Math 3B took over teaching high school-level knowledge. In fall 2025, 665 students took Math 2, 245 took Math 3B, and 173 went unplaced, for a total of 1,094.

2. Fractions, of course, should be taught in third grade, and operations with fractions in fourth and fifth.