College students fail basic math, English skills thanks to grade inflation

American college students can’t solve basic math problems or write grammatical sentences, forcing some students to enroll in college classes that teach elementary-school concepts, according to a study from the University of California San Deigo.

UC San Diego accepts roughly 25% of applications, but roughly 12 to 20% of incoming freshmen fail college entry tests – placing them in remedial courses that cover elementary, middle and high school math and English.

From 2022 to 2024, nearly 20% of incoming freshman were enrolled in the university’s Analytical Writing Program, a course for students who fail to meet “entry level writing requirements.” 

The report referenced comparable data from eight other campus colleagues, saying the numbers suggest “UC San Diego students may be impacted by recent national literacy trends,” which are “in decline nationally.”  

The report concludes that cures for the illiteracy epidemic will require separate research, citing numerous impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and an increase in online and artificial intelligence instruction. 

“Changes in the placement mechanism and how we evaluate students’ writing on the placement exam, changes to education brought on by the pandemic, and the rapid introduction of artificial intelligence tools all have and will continue to contribute to changes in students’ reading, writing, and critical thinking skills,” the report reads. 

Incoming freshmen at UC San Diego also lack appropriate math skills, according to the report. In the fall of 2024, more than 900 enrolling students at UC San Diego – 12.5% of the freshman class – were placed into two math courses teaching either elementary, middle school or high-school math. 

Less than 1% of freshmen had to take such courses before 2021, according to the report.  

In 2016, the university developed “Math 2” as a remedial math course to instruct students in high school Algebra and Geometry in preparation for the college’s precalculus courses, the report explains. 

As students continually failed even this preparatory course, the math department redesigned Math 2 to use elementary and middle school curricula, while a new course, Math 3B, covers high school (grades 9-11) Algebra and Geometry.  

The report blamed the pandemic for the major shift to online education, demonstrating how language and math levels dropped in 2022, according to the Department of Education’s research on California students’ performance. 

“Whether this decrease in achievement was about teachers being less effective at delivering instruction online, or about students being less effective at learning and retaining it – or both! – regardless, the decline is tangible and will take several years to correct,” the report said.  

High school absenteeism also has significantly increased, with 1 in 5 students, or 20%, missing more than 10% of classes in 2024, compared to just 14% of students missing class before the pandemic.  

UC San Diego and its surrounding campuses aren’t the only universities seeing a significant decline in educational preparedness. George Mason University in Virginia also revamped its math preparation program in 2023, as students struggled with basic algebra, The Atlantic reported.  

Students nationwide are significantly behind the educational performance numbers of the mid-2000s. The National Assessment of Education Progress reported 8^th-grade students are at a full year’s deficiency in math skills compared to students in 2013. 

Such academic levels revert students 50 years back to the educational achievement of the 1970s, The Atlantic reported.  

Meanwhile, the national average SAT score dropped nearly 100 points from 2006 to 2020, the Economist reported in 2024.  

The COVID-19 pandemic is not the sole factor driving this mental dulling, according to both the UC San Diego report and other national trends. In 2015, nearly 75% of high schoolers had access to smartphones, The Atlantic reported. While technology has increased, students’ educational engagement has decreased, as they become more and more dependent on Google and AI’s speed and convenience.  

Grade leniency, and thereby inflation, also coincided with the pandemic according to multiple reports, including from Harvard and Boston Universities. A Boston University professor told The Atlantic of the “no zeros” policy, which allows students to pass courses despite incompetency in the material.   

Grade inflation has occurred for decades, with the graduation rate increasing to 87% in 2020 – 13 percentage points since 2007, according to the Economist. 

More than 25% of students at UC San Diego who tested into remedial classes earned straight A’s in high school, even in advanced math courses, according to the report.  

In a November article, Naomi Schaefer Riley, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, discussed the “pyramid scheme” of grade inflation, which continually builds on previous educational leniency. High school teachers pass failing students instead of having them repeat the course, and then college professors continue to pass the students so as not to ruin their job prospects.  

The abolition of standardized testing likewise aided teachers and professors alike so that “everyone just goes along,” Riley writes.  

“And then there is the pressure to be compassionate. Who wants to tell a student they have been lied to for years and that the buck stops here? The real compassion, though, lies in telling our young people the truth.”