#6, Part 1 – Why Can’t College Students Do Middle School Math?

About this episode

What we covered:

– A recent report from the University of California San Diego revealed that 1 in 12 incoming freshmen were not proficient in middle school math – basically, anything above arithmetic with fractions. Their existing remedial math course was too advanced for these students, so they had to design even lower remedial remedial math courses. Even crazier, over a quarter of these students had a perfect 4.0 GPA in their high school math courses.

– It’s not just UCSD. This is everywhere. A similar thing happened at Harvard, too, having to add remedial support to their entry-level calculus courses. It’s like that movie Olympus Has Fallen, except this time it’s Harvard. It’s a catastrophe.

– How did things get this bad? Teachers and administrators face relentless pressure to inflate grades, and during the pandemic many universities went test-optional, removing the only signal that reliably correlated with actual math readiness. That decision simultaneously elevated high school grades to the sole gatekeeping metric, intensifying incentives to inflate them.

– This has all coincided with the advent of LLMs, which make it increasingly easy for students to cheat. The result was predictable: grades became untethered from real competence, and multiple cohorts of students entered college without ever having to demonstrate foundational math skills.

– Teachers have to play both good cop and bad cop, and there is no avoiding the latter. If you refuse to play bad cop at all, you eventually end up playing it constantly. The best teachers are strict from the start and ease up later, once students understand that hard, honest work is non-negotiable.

Outline:

00:00:00 - Introduction

00:02:11 - Freshmen math collapse: 1 in 12 UCSD freshmen don't know middle school math

00:06:45 - Remedial remedial math: UCSD created remediation for remedial math

00:08:40 - Inflated grades: 25% of remedial-remedial students had perfect GPA in HS math

00:10:06 - Test-optional admissions removed the last objective metric

00:12:13 - Pandemic inflation: GPAs skyrocketed

00:14:37 - Removing tests pressures teachers to inflate grades

00:16:52 - Grade-grubbing: endless negotiating, complaining, accusations

00:19:01 - Then vs. now: parents, tests, accountability

00:27:38 - Crisis opportunism: “Never let an emergency go to waste”

00:29:33 - No tests = no knowledge requirements

00:33:28 - Elite collapse: Harvard has the same problem

00:36:31 - No enforcement means no standards

00:37:40 - LLM cheating is trivially easy

00:38:25 - Catching a cheater and turning him around

00:48:46 - Cheating is like taking mob money. Now you’re in, you’re never out.

00:50:41 - Assessments must be done in person

00:55:06 - LLM cheating is often obvious yet hard to prove

00:57:17 - How to prevent cheating on long papers

00:58:28 - Start hardcore, then lighten up gradually

01:01:37 - Good teachers play bad cop when needed

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