Chief Quant, Director of Analytics at Math Academy. Posts about learning, upskilling, math education, Math Academy, and more generally, stages 2-3 of Bloom's talent development process in hierarchical skill domains.
New on JustinMath.com - Why Can’t College Students Do Middle School Math?; Educational Knowledge Graphs; Why Train Up Your Writing
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Hey! You're receiving this email because you requested to be notified about new posts at JustinMath.com. Here are 3 new posts: Why Can’t College Students Do Middle School Math?
~1800 words • 1 in 12 incoming UCSD freshmen don’t know middle school math, and the remedial math course was too advanced, so UCSD had to create a remedial remedial math course covering elementary and middle school math, and a quarter of the students placing into it had a perfect 4.0 GPA in their high school math courses, which included calculus or precalculus for nearly half of those remedial remedial students. And it's not just a UCSD problem -- the disease has spread so far that even Harvard had to had to add remedial support to their entry-level calculus courses to deal with a "lack of foundational algebra skills among students". The Most Important Thing to Understand About Building Educational Knowledge Graphs ~250 words • It’s subtle, but if you don’t understand it, you’re doomed to failure. You’ll build a system that students can’t learn from.
And a new podcast: Why Can’t College Students Do Middle School Math? - Math Academy Podcast #6, Part 1
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.
Timestamps:
0:00 - Introduction
2:11 - Freshmen math collapse: 1 in 12 UCSD freshmen don't know middle school math
6:45 - Remedial remedial math: UCSD created remediation for remedial math
8:40 - Inflated grades: 25% of remedial-remedial students had perfect GPA in HS math
10:06 - Test-optional admissions removed the last objective metric
12:13 - Pandemic inflation: GPAs skyrocketed
14:37 - Removing tests pressures teachers to inflate grades
16:52 - Grade-grubbing: endless negotiating, complaining, accusations
19:01 - Then vs. now: parents, tests, accountability
27:38 - Crisis opportunism: "Never let an emergency go to waste"
29:33 - No tests = no knowledge requirements
33:28 - Elite collapse: Harvard has the same problem
36:31 - No enforcement means no standards
37:40 - LLM cheating is trivially easy
38:25 - Catching a cheater and turning him around
48:46 - Cheating is like taking mob money. Now you’re in, you’re never out.
50:41 - Assessments must be done in person
55:06 - LLM cheating is often obvious yet hard to prove
57:17 - How to prevent cheating on long papers
58:28 - Start hardcore, then lighten up gradually
1:01:37 - Good teachers play bad cop when needed
Best, |
Justin Skycak
Chief Quant, Director of Analytics at Math Academy. Posts about learning, upskilling, math education, Math Academy, and more generally, stages 2-3 of Bloom's talent development process in hierarchical skill domains.
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