The largest spike in precollege math enrollment occurred between fall 2023 and fall 2024—the same time the university changed its calculator policy.
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The University of California, San Diego, published a report in November that showed a nearly 30-fold increase in the number of first-year students testing into remedial math courses since 2020. The report caught fire, quickly making national and international headlines and prompting a flurry of op-eds that fueled conversation on math readiness for months.
The report’s authors attributed the uptick in remedial math enrollments to the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on education and UC San Diego’s efforts to enroll more students from low-income high schools. But they failed to mention an essential testing policy change: Starting sometime in the spring of 2024, students were no longer able to use calculators on the math placement exam.
Pamela Burdman, founder and executive director of the math education equity nonprofit Just Equations, explained this discovery and the potential impact of the calculator ban in her own report, published Wednesday.
“Evidently, UCSD’s math faculty decided midstream that they wanted to ensure that students could answer math questions without a calculator,” Burdman wrote. “The reasons UCSD made this switch may be perfectly valid. But a decline in students’ performance in the absence of calculators was entirely predictable, assuming that nothing else on the in-person, timed test had changed.”
A still of the math placement exam webpage from May 2024, saved on the Wayback Machine, shows that “No Calculators are allowed on the MPE.” Two months earlier, the webpage states that “Non-programmable calculators are permitted,” suggesting the policy change was implemented sometime in the spring of 2024. None of the work-group members or spokespeople for UC San Diego responded to questions about this policy change or whether the report authors knew about it.
The increase in first-year students placed into precollege math courses rose alongside the number of low-income student enrollment from 2020 until 2022, at which point low-income student enrollment leveled off. The largest spike in precollege math enrollment occurred between fall 2023 and fall 2024, Burdman explained—the same time the university changed its calculator policy.
“It appears possible that about 425 additional students who were assigned to precollege courses in fall 2024 and fall 2025—or 850 students total—could have taken precalculus or calculus had the test conditions not changed. If so, the number of students requiring remedial courses would have stayed below 500, as opposed to 900-some, as it was the prior two years,” Burdman wrote. “That’s still a marked and concerning increase from 2020, one that requires a serious response. But perhaps not enough to yield the hysterical headlines and columns that have popped up in recent months.”
UC San Diego math department chair Michael Holst acknowledged how much attention the initial report received in a January statement but did not mention the calculator policy change.