Blog

What a difference a pandemic makes. Just last week, the University of California system broke with decades of tradition by deciding to permanently suspend the SAT and ACT tests as admissions requirements for the system’s nine undergraduate campuses.

As students around the country face unprecedented disruptions to their high school experiences, institutions of higher education are waiving once-rigid admissions requirements, such as test scores and grades in required courses. In some respects, colleges have little choice but to be flexible in the coronavirus’ wake: No SAT or ACT tests are being administered for the foreseeable future...

Diversifying the pathways students take through high school and college mathematics has the potential to open avenues to college for more students. That’s why many of us support efforts to expand math pathways to teach rigorous content in ways that are not only interesting to far more students, but also more relevant for those students’ lives and aspirations.

The recent debate over California State University’s well-intended proposal to require an additional quantitative reasoning (QR) course for admission highlights the challenges of efforts to bolster mathematics preparation. And the CSU trustees’ recent decision to first conduct more extensive analyses bodes well for advancing equitable math opportunity.

Why does high school calculus, generally AP Calculus, play such an outsize role in the access to competitive colleges? And should it? Clearly the reason for the dominance of Calculus is not that all students who take AP Calculus in high school go on to major in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields that actually require them to know calculus.