UC Berkeley Professor Says Calculus Students Can't Do Fractions, Blames Test-Blind Admissions

A UC Berkeley math professor who lectures to halls of up to 1,400 students says she can spot which ones are in academic trouble within two weeks. Not because they struggle with calculus. Because they can't do fractions.

Zvezdelina Stankova laid it out in an August 15 op-ed for the San Francisco Standard: "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."

Stankova isn't some outside critic. She earned her PhD from Harvard after growing up in communist Bulgaria, founded the Berkeley Math Circle, and has spent decades building math education programs for California kids. This is someone who has skin in the game.

The Numbers She's Citing

Stankova points to diagnostic exams given to Calculus I students. Between 2018 and 2020, when UC still used the SAT and ACT, 71% of roughly 2,200 tested students were "ready or nearly ready" for the course. Just 0.14% scored below basic algebra.

Fast forward to 2021-2023, after UC dropped standardized testing. Only 51% of about 2,800 tested students were ready or nearly ready. By 2023 that number fell to 44%. Seventeen percent got zero out of eight tested topics correct, according to Fox News's reporting on her data. The College Fix reported that more than a third of students in that period showed severe math deficits, with zero as the single most common score.

How UC Got Here

UC Berkeley didn't stumble into test-blind admissions by accident. In January 2020, a UC task force studied standardized testing and recommended keeping it, according to the Standard. Then-UC President Janet Napolitano, who ran the Department of Homeland Security under President Obama, overruled her own task force and pushed the Board of Regents to phase out the SAT and ACT anyway, citing pandemic disruptions and "equity" concerns.

The regents voted in May 2020 to make testing optional. A subsequent court ruling, centered on access for students with disabilities, forced UC to go fully test-blind through 2025. Admissions officers have not been allowed to consider standardized test scores since.

MIT, Stanford, Harvard, and Yale all dropped testing during COVID too. They've all since reinstated it. UC hasn't. According to The College Fix, UC's Academic Senate now plans a review that won't conclude until June 2027, meaning no new admissions policy could take effect before fall 2028. Stankova's response: "Students don't have that kind of time: They attend college once."

Faculty Are Organized, Not Just Complaining

This isn't one professor venting. Thousands of faculty across all 10 UC campuses, including more than two-thirds of UC's math faculty, signed open letters this year demanding the SAT and ACT come back. Five Nobel laureates signed on. So did Beatriz Manz, Berkeley's first Latina full professor, whose involvement undercuts the idea that this is some kind of backlash against diversity efforts.

A June open letter from UC STEM faculty specifically rejected the argument that dropping the math testing requirement helps equity. Locally, the northern San Diego school board passed a resolution this month calling on UC to reinstate testing for STEM majors, arguing that "admitting students into STEM programs without verified math readiness does not advance equity — it increases the risk of course failure, academic difficulty and degree incompletion," according to The College Fix.

The Fairness Argument on the Other Side

Standardized tests correlate with family income and access to prep resources. Supporters of test-blind admissions have long argued the tests measure privilege as much as ability, and that removing them opens doors for capable students whose high schools didn't prepare them to take a $60 exam multiple times with paid coaching. That's a real concern, and it's why the 2020 task force debate wasn't unanimous even among people who study this seriously.

Stankova's diagnostic data suggests the fix created a different problem: students getting admitted to competitive STEM programs without the baseline skills to survive them. The Standard cited two anonymized examples: one student with weak high school math got into a top UC engineering program, while another with A's in college-level Calculus II got rejected from multiple UC campuses. Stankova used that contrast to argue the current system isn't sorting for ability at all.

What Happens Next

UC Berkeley did not immediately respond to Stankova's op-ed, according to reporting that sought comment from university spokespeople. The system's Academic Senate review is scheduled to run through June 2027, meaning current high school freshmen will be well into their college search before any policy change could take effect. Whether that timeline moves up under faculty pressure, or whether UC holds its position, is the open question nobody in Oakland or Sacramento has answered yet.