Rahul Mehta Gandhinagar LsCandidate

I cant believe this is true !!!

Good Financial Cents:

The headline is wild, but the details behind it might be even more concerning.

First, this was NOT a statewide study saying every California kid with a 4.0 can’t do math.

This came from UC San Diego.

In one Fall 2024 remedial math cohort of 529 students, 42% had already passed precalculus or calculus in high school.

And 25% had earned a 4.0 GPA in their high school math classes.

Yet they ended up in Math 2, a course designed around math gaps reaching back into middle school.

And here’s the part that’s hard to get past:

In placement testing of remedial students, 25% couldn’t correctly solve:

7 + 2 = ___ + 6

That’s not calculus.

That’s not even algebra.

That’s basic arithmetic.

The problem also appears to be getting bigger.

At UCSD, the percentage of incoming students needing remedial math reportedly went from 0.5% in 2020 to 11.8% in 2025.

And this is happening while high school GPAs across the UC system have been climbing.

Here’s the part that really bothers me.

For these UCSD students, high school math grades had a surprisingly weak relationship with how they actually performed on placement testing.

So at some point, you have to ask what a 4.0 is actually telling us.

Because a grade is supposed to communicate mastery.

If a kid can earn straight A’s in math, pass precalculus or calculus, and still arrive at college needing help with middle-school-level math, something in that system clearly isn’t lining up.