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This is basically exclusively for the Humanities students at Cal. Majority of the STEM ones all came in with the calculus sequence finished already.

Another big issue is that many of these under-prepared students came from the same Bay Area 'under-represented' feeder schools: https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2026/uc-acceptance-rate...

The sooner Cal cleans its act up, the better. College admissions IS zero-sum and it's absolutely harmful for the students rejected and those enrolled to accept unqualified candidates.

Calc isn't required to get into a humanities programs in UC schools

That's my point. It's not a prerequisite for them, so they're able to get accepted with remdial math scores, making the entire university look bad.

University objectives of making a diverse student body (an objective I basically agree with!) make this tricky and futzy (but not impossible IMO! You can always do something a bit hybrid), but I really feel like if some US university just decided to go to an entrance exam model they'd probably instantly have a cohort of students that would be _much_ easier to onboard into university materials.

Biggest problem is you'd need to make the entrance exams _actually tough_. Like "basically nobody who takes it gets an A". The objective is to rank students between each other, after all! It doesn't matter if the top scorer only has a 70% or something.

Every argument against standardized testing in this kind of thing seems to boil down to "test results are heavily correlated to socio-economic status". But... every other form of university entrance criteria process is even more correlated, right? All those extracurriculars aren't free after all.

I would support this wholeheartedly. In fact, make the exams blind. No name or info on the exam. Completely fair and level ground for all!

This isn't normal?

Not in USA.

> Biggest problem is you'd need to make the entrance exams _actually tough_. Like "basically nobody who takes it gets an A". The objective is to rank students between each other, after all! It doesn't matter if the top scorer only has a 70% or something.

Plenty of other countries already do it this way

Yeah I did the French engineering school exams, I got a looooot of nasty grades in some of the test banks.

I was in the American school system up until HS and then moved to France. The _way_ stricter grading compared to what I had in the US was very hard to get used to.

One thing that I did witness while studying for the engineering school exams (which is a whole two year affair) was seeing a lot of people who were very used to being the top of their class and getting good grades flame out, because they had already been working super hard in high school to keep their grades up.

I think there's a good chunk of "straight A students" who might struggle with the hit to their ego in that environment. But it was helpful and humbling to me.

It also really opens your eyes to the reaches of what you learn can achieve when applied intelligently. My favorite class in university, by far, was an astronomy/astrophysics type class. I think I scored around a 60%, which ended up being a 4.0 for the class. It was just brutal, but seeing what was at least possible to achieve from what we were learning was also amazing.

Speaking as a teacher it's highly unfortunate that at most schools this doesn't really fly - even with curving, because parents and kids alike expect 100% for basic understanding and application. So it's the analog of understanding akin to an assembly line worker instead of an engineer. This is especially a shame in the era of LLMs when rote regurgitation is becoming increasingly irrelevant, and higher order 'understanding' is becoming much more relevant. Though obviously the rote work is necessary to achieve that deeper understanding, but not a path by itself.

I've always been much more an application than theory guy, but we all have to adapt to technology and this is where it's at now.

I've told myself if I ever become a teacher I'll do things like make tests out of 250 or something like that, and make sure enough points go around. Ultimately I wouldn't want to punish the students, but at least give them opportunities to get the points they need to get a good grade, and then have opportunities to push themselves for the rest of the material.

(on the entrance exams.... in some of the test banks they do something quite cruel where they determine that if roughly everyone gets some question right then they just award zero points for that specific answer....)

Concerning [5], the article says he was rejected at UC Santa Barbara. Haven't checked in a while, but I believe UCSB historically accepts 40-50% of first time applicants. The schools were not using SAT scores at the time, and UC has banned race considerations in admissions for nearly 30 years. Surely there's more to this story.

They “banned” them. This lawsuit contends they don’t actually stop using them. That's the basis of the claims. Read it

Most schools that say they don't consider race in admissions mean they don't use a racial quota where e.g. they require x% of the student body to be some minority or whatever. That's because such quotas have been ruled illegal. But the way admissions generally work is that your application is graded on a points system, and they get around the law by using a points modifier based on race. And that modifier can be adjusted as necessary to ensure they get exactly x% of the student body to be that minority. So it's racial quotas by proxy.

Another modifier is going to be parental income, which I think makes much more sense than race. But those two modifiers can compound to make it where something like an Asian from a high household income family needs to essentially be the next Einstein in order to be admitted over an average student who happens to be from a historically poor performing minority.

“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,” wrote Zvezdelina Stankova, of UC Berkeley, in an op-ed piece on Saturday for the San Francisco Standard.

Stankova — who rose through the mathematics world to earn a PhD from Harvard after being born in communist Bulgaria — described the admissions process as “less like careful evaluation and more like chance.”

Coincidentally, I just checked law school rankings in CA. In my day (mid 90's), Boalt Hall was at the very top, and most kids were told don't even bother trying for it. Now it's not in the top 15 in the nation and latest USNR has it third in CA behind Stanford and UCLA.

Stanford has been top three in the US for at least twenty years (the other two are Yale and Harvard), and UCLA hovered in 14–16 range for twenty years as well. The past few years, the rankings went haywire. I think their methodology changed, bc there isn't a law firm in the world that would hire a Chicago student over a Harvard student, ceteris paribus.

Boalt has kind of been the butt of a lot of jokes since I was a student decades ago. Maybe those jokes came to fruition. (A bit like Brown among the Ivies.)

Lol. Maybe it was the environment I was in, then. I worked in a law office throughout high school. Half of the firm were Hastings who talked up the fortress that was Boalt Hall.

Hmmm ... lots of NY Post stuff.

> Bay Area high school grad rejected by 16 colleges hired by Google -- Zhong had a 3.97 unweighted and 4.42 weighted GPA, scored 1590 out of 1600 on the SAT's

How does that relate to Berkeley?

> Bay Area high school grad rejected by 16 colleges hired by Google -- Zhong had a 3.97 unweighted and 4.42 weighted GPA, scored 1590 out of 1600 on the SAT's

What's the point here? Whatever happened with that person, there are many more Berkeley applicants who have exceptional records.

(There must be more to the story - neither citation says why he was rejected. To the degree there is discrimination, I expect it would be against borderline applicants and not exceptional ones.)

I can make any point by cherrypicking whatever data I want.

Please do.

With enough researcher degrees of freedom, you can make the data appear to support almost any reasonable story, sure. But that's not what's going on here - unless you have a pointed issue with the methodology, which if so, please state.

My guess is that you're just repeating something to dismiss something you agree with, and misunderstand the quote you're using.

> Are they?

Imagine how the kids that get rejected are performing.