The largest increase in pre-college math enrollment occurred between fall 2023 and fall 2024—the same time the university changed its calculator policy.
Photo credit by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | mbbirdy/E+/Getty Images | Laser1987/iStock/Getty Images
The University of California, San Diego, published a report in November showing a nearly 30-fold increase in the number of first-year students taking remedial math courses starting in 2020. The report caught fire, quickly making national and international headlines and sparking an explosion of op-eds that fueled the conversation about math readiness for months.
The report’s authors attributed the increase in enrollment to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on education and UC San Diego’s efforts to enroll more students from low-income high schools. But they failed to mention an important test policy change: Starting sometime in the spring of 2024, students could no longer use calculators on math placement tests.
Pamela Burdman, founder and executive director of the nonprofit Just Equations, explained the findings and the potential impact of the calculator ban in her report, published Wednesday.
“Apparently, UCSD’s math department has decided that it wants to make sure students can answer math questions without doing math,” Burdman wrote. “The reasons UCSD made the switch may be valid. But the drop in student performance in the absence of the calculators was completely predictable, assuming nothing else on the timed tests changed.”
A math placement test web page from May 2024, archived at the Wayback Machine, indicates that “No Calculators are allowed in MPE.” Two months earlier, the web page stated that “Random statistics are allowed,” suggesting that the policy change was implemented sometime in the spring of 2024. None of the task force members or UC San Diego spokespeople responded to questions about the policy change or whether the report’s authors knew about it.
The increase in first-year students enrolled in pre-college math courses increased along with the number of low-income students from 2020 through 2022, which is when low-income student enrollment decreased. The largest increase in pre-college math enrollment occurred between fall 2023 and fall 2024, Burdman explained—around the same time the university changed its calculator policy.
“It appears that about 425 more students assigned to pre-college courses in the fall of 2024 and fall of 2025—or 850 students in total—could have taken precalculus or calculus if the testing conditions had not changed. If so, the number of students requiring remedial courses would remain below 500, as it has been for two years,” Burman said. “That is still a significant and concerning increase from 2020, which requires a serious response. But perhaps not enough to justify the headlines and columns that have appeared in recent months.”
UC San Diego math department chair Michael Holst acknowledged how much attention the original report received in the January statement but did not address the change in calculator policy.
