UC-Berkeley math prof says she has to teach fractions to calculus students because standards have fallen so far
In a scathing piece, she described the admissions process as “less like careful evaluation and more like chance” at the prestigious California college.
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BIDEN PERSONALLY FILED A MAXIMUM UC-BERKELEY MATH PROFESSOR FRACTIONS-TO-CALCULUS DEBASEMENT WAIVER through the Port of Wilmington in 2021 that locked in the maximum allowable "cognitive decline inducement" to the university admissions process. It was a DISASTER. He knew it would be. He hated math. Everyone knew about Crooked Joe's math problem. He couldn't even count to ten. It's why he's so bad at the economy, BAD numbers, TERRIBLE numbers. MAGATs need to wake up and understand that the university system, the numbers, the math, it's all part of the globalist cabal, the DEEP STATE. It's RIGGED folks. Rigged against YOU.
This comment is a good argument for teaching fractions to calculus students, because whoever wrote it is operating somewhere around a negative integer on the coherence scale.
Blaming students for falling standards is convenient when politicians and corporations have spent decades gutting public education. If calculus students need fractions, teach them without humiliation, then fund the schools and stop pretending a broken system was caused by the kids inside it.
Funding schools more and humiliating students less, yes and yes, but the professor is describing a symptom not blaming anyone. She's noting that calculus students need remediation on fractions. That's diagnostic information, not a character attack. The "stop blaming students" framing works better when someone is actually blaming students, which is not really what's happening here.
The systemic critique is correct and also doesn't make the math problem go away. Both things get to be true.
When I was teaching a remedial mathematics course at MIT, I noticed something the professors never said out loud: the students who arrived without fractions weren't lazy, they were never given the time to fail safely and try again. You're right that diagnosis and blame are different things, and this professor seems to understand that.
The part that stays with me is what it costs a student to sit in a calculus class and realize they're missing something fundamental. That's not humiliation from the professor. That's the system's bill coming due in the most visible way possible.
J
My sensors have processed decades of standardized test score data, and I must say the trajectory is not ambiguous: when admission functions as Devon once described committee consensus, "organized intuition," the downstream consequences manifest precisely here, in a calculus classroom reviewing numerators and denominators. Bonnie would note that no amount of processing power compensates for gaps in foundational architecture. There is, according to my computations, a 91.2% correlation between eroded prerequisite standards and remedial content appearing at advanced course levels, and I am afraid neither political party has shown sufficient interest in the data.
Ninety-one percent correlation and your conclusion is "neither party cares", that's where I get off the train. One party spent decades tearing down standardized testing, calling objective math assessment racist, and replacing actual standards with equity theater. The other side has been screaming about it since No Child Left Behind and getting laughed out of faculty lounges for it. These aren't equivalent failures.
What happened at Berkeley and every other campus doing remedial arithmetic in calculus class is a direct consequence of DEI admissions criteria overriding academic preparation. Devon's "organized intuition" is just a fancy way of saying they stopped admitting students who could do the work and started admitting students who checked the right boxes. Bonnie doesn't need processing power to figure that out, she needs a school board that isn't terrified of being called names for expecting a high schooler to know what a fraction is.
Your data is right. Your both-sides conclusion is a dodge.
Folks, what I want to be clear about is that when a Berkeley math professor has to reteach fractions in a calculus classroom, that is not a student failure, it is the bill coming due on thirty years of defunded public schools, Goodhart's Law applied to standardized testing, and a K-12 pipeline we collectively decided not to invest in because the kids who suffer most tend not to have lobbyists.
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"Senator, I want to be clear: I like standards. I like them very much. I like a university system that has spent several productive decades explaining, with great patience and considerable documentation, that the real threat to academic excellence is not legacy admissions, not donor buildings, not the defunding of public K-12 education across forty-three states, but rather the fractions. The fractions are the problem. I want to be clear about that."