UC Faculty Say Dropping the SAT Created a STEM Readiness Crisis. Now They Want It Back - Svetlana Jitomirskaya, UC Berkeley Professor of Mathematics

This is The TechEd Podcast, where we feature leaders who are shaping, innovating, and disrupting technical education and the workforce. These are the stories of organizations leading the charge to change education to rethink the workforce and to embrace emerging technology. You'll find us here every Tuesday on our mission to secure the American dream for the next generation of STEM and workforce talent. And now here's your host, Matt Kirchner.

It's Matt Kirchner on The TechEd Podcast. I will say that now, well into my 50s, if I can admit that there aren't a lot of things anymore that necessarily shock me. You know, you get to a point in life where you kind of feel like you've seen everything. I will tell you, though, that I read not too long ago both a headline and an article in the Wall Street Journal and an op-ed that was associated with that article that absolutely blew me away, and I think it speaks to so many things that are taking place in STEM education, and the standards that we're setting for admissions when we're welcoming new students into our four year STEM programs at the university level, and how we need to be informing our secondary educators about preparing the next generation of STEM talent.

I will also tell you that I think it speaks to some broader issues here in the United States and around the globe, and so that's what we're going to talk about. Is this shocking article that I read, the headline was University of California professors are begging schools to reinstate the SAT, and it says, as the sub headline, open letter cites quote severe preparation deficits among incoming students. That article had a link to an opinion piece that was written by two authors, one of whom joins me today, and I am just telling you that this is going to be a really, really fascinating conversation.

I am joined today by Dr. Svetlana Zertomiska of the University of California, Berkeley, where she serves as a professor of mathematics and again a co-author of an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. Let me just start out, Svetlana, by welcoming you to The TechEd Podcast. It's a pleasure to have you with us.

Thank you very much, Matt. Thank you for having me here. So, here we are in the United States of America. In this day and age, it seems as though it's hard to get two people to agree on much of anything in some particular cases, and here you wrote this open letter, and I should mention that the open letter was written to three groups of people, the University of California regents, the Academic Senate leadership, and then why not throw in the entire state of California?

So you wrote it also to the people of California, and you got as a result of this. I just checked it this morning, think it was 1400 plus now STEM professors that have signed on to this open letter, so professors from the state of California, seven of the nine chairs of University California University of California mathematics departments, and an additional 45 STEM department chairs across the entire state of California. So to get this many people signing on to the same open letter to some really, really important policy makers in your state, and particularly in the University of California system.

What's going on here? Why do you have so much support for this letter, and what message are you trying to send? Well, so one quick correction, it's already 53 department chairs. Is it really?

So it was 45 it's now 53 Wow, I stand corrected. So another interesting data is that there are people not just from STEM, so it was focused on STEM, but we have signatories from 25 departments with different names that are not in STEM, and a total of something like 120 departments with different names, like Department of Mathematics, all of them sign many people from all campuses signed, but it counts as one, so 120 different names of departments. So basically, it's we get support from everyone.

Yeah, I mean, you really have the at the entire, but I mean across the board, across the system, so you know, this isn't like some contained, like, just small group of people that are upset about something and trying to make a big deal about it. It's like everybody you're talking to says this is an issue. Absolutely not. Absolutely not.

The support has been wider than we expected it would be, but we thought it would be strong. We thought it would be almost unanimous in mathematics, because of what we observed. We were a bit surprised and shocked that this is also observed by the others, and actually our humanities colleagues tell us that things they see may be even worse, a bit, but your podcast. Focus is on stem, so I'll stick to that.

And I should tell our audience, as we were getting warmed up for the episode, your life has like changed over the course of the last week, because you're like, hey, I just thought we were writing this letter. Now, in fact, I mentioned to Melissa, our producer here at the podcast last week, when I, when I read the letter, and I said, this is going to be huge. I said, this is just, just watch, you know, this next week, this thing is going to proliferate, and it did. I want you to explain to our audience what's in the letter.

I mean, summarize it from 30,000 feet. What is the point you're trying to make? What are you seeing in this next generation, or maybe the past generation of STEM students that has you so concerned? Okay, so the letter is focused on the changes in what we observe since the SAT was dropped, I must say that actually the trend, certain trend, has precipitated that, and that was a certain trend in admissions.

So the main focus of the letter, the main action we require, we ask the regions to do as soon as possible is to reinstate the SAT requirement, so yeah, and just, just to expand on that for a moment, you know, so the, at some point, you know, 567, years ago, you can tell me the exact date the university system decided that the SAT scores for students was no longer going to be a criteria for admission to the UC system, is that correct? That is correct. And the story was actually quite interesting and quite dramatic, because there is a system of shared governance, and in principle, regions should consult and listen to what faculty says, that's important, right, especially on matters of research and teaching, right?

Sure, our prerogative, so the regents requested faculty to study whether to drop the SATs. The reason was political, because there was a lot of push, political push that SAT leads to racial and social economic gaps, especially in STEM enrollment, actually, and that SAT is a barrier, right, that SAT is not a fair test, or whatnot. And so our faculty governance system worked. So there was a committee created to study this issue to study whether it is indeed this test that prevents capable minority and low socioeconomic students to enter UC and what is interesting that the committee from all campuses was made mainly not out of stem people, but out of sociology people, out of people who actually originally believed that the city should be dropped.

Interesting. So, you say, so you're saying, in the, in for our audience, and I'm well familiar with it, but the idea of shared governance is that you've got, you know, administrative people that are that are leading a university system, you have faculty in the university system, and the idea is that they share responsibility for, you know, you know, for leading, for making sure that standards are maintained, for making sure that we're meeting the goals of education, and so on, exactly.

And the committee that was made was actually, I would say, originally biased against SAT, it shouldn't have been, but it was, but it was nevertheless honest. So it worked for a year. It studied the data, studied admission data. What would have happened with this cohort looking at the hard data if safety was dropped, and they realized that even just taking this goal of increasing access to minority and low socioeconomic status students that even just for this goal SAT is helpful, not harmful.

Yeah, and I want to talk about that here in just a minute, because that there was some really some counterintuitive, I think, insights in your, in your open letter, and some of the things that I've read since, in terms of whether changing the standard on the SAT helps or hurts individuals from underrepresented communities. I want to get into that in a minute, before we do, just to make sure our audience understands how acute this problem is. And there were some statistics. Credit to you and your co-author for just being incredibly succinct and picking some great examples of how we can really drive this home.

The first one, it was, it was an example from the University of California, San Diego, by fall of 2025 So that's not quite a year ago. It said one in 12 entering students was placed into a remedial math program to learn material taught in sometimes as early as middle school and in high school, so I mean, literally, you've got students that are graduating from high school, entering a STEM degree program, and in some cases are still working on mastering middle school math. Is that correct?

And what's going on that way? It's actually worse. When writing the letter, we were debating whether to use middle school or. Elementary school in that place, and we then thought that elementary would be too offensive, so with that old and middle, but it is includes elementary school material.

You should look at the actual link in the open letter, it shows a list of problems from the Santiago report, that is the most interesting link in the whole thing, and that's what actually made everyone feel that it is a true emergency. It is a link consists 12 problems from the test administered to those students, those one of out of 12 San Diego freshmen placed in the remedial program, and problems range in the level of difficulty from grade eight to grade one. Wow, each of this problem, at least the percentage of this class who solved it.

This is the most interesting thing. There are problems from grade 345, that were solved by not at all an overwhelming percentage of these students, and this was a test. It was not a rash test. 30 minutes were given for 30 problems, and it shows them it gives a sample of problems, but they were roughly in increasing difficulty.

One of the problems that I saw, Svetlana was, if I remember correctly, I might not get the numbers right, but it was seven times six equals six plus x. Right now, I will admit that I was not a very good algebra student in high school, but I can solve that one, you know? I mean, so, so, so, I mean we're laughing, but it's really not funny, right? It's tragic and tragic.

When I saw this, I was so embarrassed, and so.. and to think about, you know, take this a bunch of different directions. The first one is this: you know, think about being a faculty member, and I would love for you to share with our audience what that feels like. So now your response, your outcomes, what's expected of your program hasn't changed, right?

I mean, you still have requirements and learning outcomes and standards that you have to meet in whatever program you're teaching, whatever coursework your students are doing, they have four years to master those subjects, but that they're coming in with such a remedial level, in some cases, of understanding of mathematics, that that's now falling on faculty to try and catch them up, is that right? That is correct, and that is what shouldn't be. We shouldn't be doing so much remediation, you see.

The problem is actually as acute in writing, so at Berkeley, for example, about 1000 undergraduates each year are placed into remedial writing program. Now this takes a lot of resources, right? Teachers need to be hired specifically for that, instead of, you know, what Berkeley is supposed to be, because I don't know if your audience knows, but California actually has a remarkable public education system. It was a master plan created in 1960 under the government, Governor Pat Brown.

I remember Pat Brown, yeah, yes, and it created a beautiful access to higher education for every Californian who wants it without any sacrifice in academic standard merit and quality. There is a three tier system. There is a system, University of California, these research universities, including Berkeley, which is premier university. It is on par with top universities, I believe.

Sure, and as like UCSD, from which the report came, is also one of the top universities in the country. So, these are really cream of the crop universities. Yes. Then there is a second state university system called Cal State, which are more teaching-oriented universities, and there is a robust system of community colleges, for sure, and the idea was that top certain percent, like 12% of Californians, by certain measures that originally was supposed to include both GPA and the city, should be always allowed apply place in one of the UC campuses again, depending on the performance, right?

The next, the top some 30% in Cal State, and everybody else could go to community college, and then there is a robust transfer system after those who perform well in community colleges, and they can take as long as they want. They want community colleges are virtually free, they can transfer to EC or to Cal State, and they can get excellent education this way. This is a beautiful, robust system, and the recent changes. Has been just kind of pushing remediation.

Remediation should be happening at community colleges, nowhere else, right? Sure, right? Or yeah, or pushing it back into the high schools, saying all right, back into the head. In an ideal system, there shouldn't be remediation at all, right?

Unfortunately, California K-12 education is in a horrible state, right. What is happening is really an indication of that, right. And unfortunately, this cannot be easily changed, but again, for various political reasons, it starts with exposure, exposing the issue, and we're going to get into, in a minute, some of the ramifications for the workforce, and so on, of what's happening, and I should mention, by the, by the way, that I, you know, I work with educators across the United States, and I would say that this issue, while, is you did such a beautiful job of explaining what you're facing, that I think it provides a great example.

California certainly isn't alone in a situation of deteriorating admission standards, challenges in education, and we've got some shining stars as well. So, there's places across the United States that are figuring things out, others that are struggling, and so this certainly not picking on the state of California, necessarily. Other than your op-ed really provides us with a great example of what the issue is. I want to ask you what I know is a loaded question, but all right, so we're not allowed to, or we're not able to rely on SAT scores for admissions criteria.

Why not just look at the GPAs from the students coming out of programs in the high schools and base it on that? Why do you call it a loaded question? Everybody knows that at many schools GPA doesn't mean anything at all, that's why it's a loaded question. I knew the answer, but go ahead.

You see, this San Diego report shows that in this same remedial class, where you see what problem students cannot solve, about a quarter of students in that class got A's on their high school AP calculus, so this is.. let me just make sure I'm understanding that right. So, you've got students that are entering into remedial math programs, right? So, they're getting to the UC system, their math scores aren't up to quite up to snuff, and so you're putting them into remedial courses, so that they can, you know, they can brush up their skills and hopefully be successful with the academic rigors of math through a STEM program, and you're telling me that 25% of these students that end up in the remedial program got 4.

0 in math in high school, is that my understanding, that Ray, maybe not four point holes, but close to that. I think the report says that the average grade was a minus or something. Okay, a minus. All right, close enough.

All right, right. And at Berkeley, the lowest quartile of GPA is four point 25 Wow, and yet like 30% of students in Gateway Calculus class basically failing. Wow, that really, really show that really, really shows you the, you know, how cute this problem is, and how big the, how big the problem is. And so, you know, so not being able to rely on SATs, not having, I'll call it integrity, and the GPAs coming from, from secondary schools, really, I mean, it really, really creates a challenge, and we talked about some of the challenges for faculty.

Certainly, I want to, I want to talk now and go back to something Svetlana that you said a little bit earlier, and this is on the topic of underrepresented communities, and I will tell you, you know, I live near the city of Milwaukee. Our audience knows that we have a K 12 system in the city that, you know, despite efforts on the part of lots and lots of people, has struggled now for I would say four to five generations in preparing that next generation of talent, and I just, I feel my heart breaks for the students that are in that system, that for you know, in some cases, through no fault of their own or their families, you know, can attain the kind of academic performance or be able to be educated in the way that they would want to be, so I don't hear you saying that we don't need to focus on raising the floor for underrepresented communities, but, but there are some under unintended consequences that we're seeing in terms of in terms of representation for qualified students from underrepresented communities in the UC system.

I don't know if I queued that's that question up as well as I, I could have, but, but what are some of these unintended consequences on underrepresented communities as students are leaving high school and, and not being held to the same standards that they had been in the past with regard to SATs, and so on. Yeah, the most horrible consequences are precisely on the students you are talking about. Okay, basically the K 12 education fails them, fails them completely. That's what we observe.

They are never.. this is not their fault. We get students actually by the measures now that they excel in the con. Text of the high school, so they do everything that was required of them, right?

So you get A's in the AP calculus classes, but that's how those A's are given, you know. I talked to one student, and I asked him, 'Oh, you got into AP calculus in grade 11? It is very impressive. So when did you learn that you're good at math?

And he said, "Mass is very difficult for me, but I persevered, and I memorized all the formulas. Jeez, okay. And that student got a for his AP calculus and one on a national AP test. Wow, yeah.

So that shows that the standards of what he has been taught at his high school, he did what was required for him to get an A. How would he know that he had to do something other than memorizing the formulas? So, he was not math, he was taught what some of my colleagues call anti-mass, right? Just antith, is that he said, yeah, it's just rote memorization, yeah, unexplained, unrelated facts to be memorized and then forgotten, right?

The problem is that math education is often done by teachers who don't know math themselves, who hate math, and all they can do is to pass the hatred to the next generation, right? Interesting, and this is not this teacher's fault either, because that's how the system works. That's how the in the Ed schools, they are taught everything, like a lot of the I in California, but very little math, and there is no accountability, accountability, there is no testing, but we also have a lot of wonderful teachers, you know.

Our letter struck really struck chord with the teachers. We get so many responses from high school teachers who say that they see the same thing, that they, they are forced by the system to teach in these classrooms, they're forced to do this differentiation, teaching the classrooms where one student performs at super high level and another struggles with their multiplication tables, and they're forced to teach them simultaneously. They cannot. They also pushed very much to inflate grades, and so forth.

The system is completely broken. Interesting. So, let me, let me ask you this question. Let's, let's say you were a principal at a high school.

Let's say you were a superintendent in a school district. Let's say you were the state superintendent of schools for K 12. What would you be doing differently in the high schools from a leadership standpoint, and what lessons can secondary educators take from this conversation that we're having. This is an interesting question.

As a leader in my own high school, I would stand up to the pressure from above. I know that schools get a lot of pressure from the state to satisfy various metrics, and so forth, and some of these metrics are good, like improve this API score, right? That's the number of students doing well on the state exams, right, but many other metrics are not, and they're contradictory, right? If you need to lower the number of failing grades, right, you cannot at the same time uphold the standards, right, and you've got to teach less well, and basically, so many letters from the teachers are thinking up for raising decisions.

Basically, it sounds like a cry for help. So, you're saying from K-12 teachers, not just, you know, professors or instructors, teachers specifically, Professor just sign our letter, right? K 12 teachers just says it, and you see if there was an SAT. So, going back to your question about effect as the effect on the underserved population, so suppose somebody was already failed by bad math education, but if there was an SAT, and if that person knew that there is this test between them and their dream degree, they would have been motivated to prepare for it, right?

And there are lots of very high quality free resources right now, and they would have studied for it, and those are the students we see are very, very highly motivated, right, and they would have studied for it, and they would have maybe come prepared, right, but at the moment they never knew that they should do that. They did everything their failing high school has asked them to do, and now then they come to Berkeley, and they are in for a huge shock. They're in for basically devastation of their dreams.

Absolutely right. So many of them don't stay in STEM, so many of them actually change majors or drop out, or if they do stay in STEM, they have to take calculus for three. Times, and so forth, all that is so counterproductive. The worst effect is precisely on this student.

So, basically, this abolishment of SAT was done supposedly in the name of equity, but it was counterproductive in this respect. Maybe the most is that what you mean there was a there was a sentence in your op-ed that said we are in quoting directly we are placing 1000s of students at the mercy of a coin flop, risking academic disaster and calling it equitable access. Is that, is that what you're hitting on there exactly? Because, as I say, we get the students who come to Gateway courses at Berkeley to calculus courses, it's all in our documents unprepared, and there are many of them.

Basically, 50% of them, almost 50% of them fail this class, and this is devastating for a student who was doing everything right, told they were doing it right, yeah, yeah, exactly. And then it's placed in such a class. Why do we do that to them? That's a great, great question.

I think, and I don't, I don't have the perfect answer for that, for sure. Why would we do that? The, it feels like the answer is that we shouldn't, and we know that the answer is that we shouldn't, and, and again, you know, nobody is, we're talking about doing this and having this conversation in the name of equitable access, in the name of giving as many young people opportunities, you know, regardless of what community they came from, regardless of where or around whom they grew up, that's that's what this is all about, but if we are simply lowering the standard in secondary education in such a way that they, they get through it, but then they, they run into a brick wall when they get to an institution like UC San Diego or UC Berkeley.

That's like one of the cruelest things you could do to somebody is set them up for failure, right. Absolutely cruel. It's absolutely cruel, and I do hope very much that maybe the regions will recognize that, but you see, the interesting thing is that after that faculty committee in 2020 produced a report saying that the city should be preserved, the region themselves spoke for preserving the SAT at the very same meeting where they later voted for abolishing it. Well, mash up of their presentations.

I don't know if you can show it. We'll link it up, so we have show notes for every single episode, so if you want to, if you want to share the up for the audience, that's fascinating, fascinating stuff. Wanna really quickly kind of work our way back into this whole conversation of the outcomes and the results of what you're seeing in terms of the readiness on the part of students for STEM programs as they're entering the UC system, and we've certainly established well on this episode of The TechEd Podcast that there's a huge shortcoming in terms of where they need to be generalizing, because I'm sure there's students that are that arrive well ready for the rigors of STEM coursework, but clearly way too many of them are not.

What does this mean for employers? We have a lot of employers, especially STEM students, so whether that's an engineering student, whether it's a math student, a data science student, computer science student, you know, a physics student, what have you. I mean, we have a lot of individuals listening to this podcast who are hiring this talent out of our four year universities. What is this going to mean for the future talent here in the United States?

You know, especially when technology isn't slowing down, innovation isn't slowing down, the need for people who are adept in STEM disciplines is certainly growing, not getting smaller. What is this going to mean for the future of the workforce? Should we be worried? We absolutely should.

However, there is one counterintuitive thing in all this, because basically what our admissions have been doing, and this is not as I said at the beginning, this process started before the drop of the SAT. Basically, our admissions, unfortunately, unlike the faculty, are quite ideologically captured. What has been happening, the factor that they have been punishing in their rubric. I don't know how they organize it, but they are punishing high-performance schools, basically.

the rate of admissions from high performing schools is lower than from so from high performing schools, you're talking about high performing high schools, high performing high schools, that's measured by what? Yeah, how measured by so all California students take this readiness test, so measured by the number of students who pass the benchmarks on the state testing, but this is also this can be observed anecdotally. So I am very familiar with one local public high schools where my kids went, and it is super common.

By one of the super competitive high schools, where you get like 15 national merit semi finalists a year, right? Like a dozen students with must be smart kids you have. Well, I wonder where they get that. I'm not talking about my kids, 50 class.

so like 12 perfect SAT scorers 26 APs they get 100% rate of fives on AP Calculus BC whatnot, so super super competitive and I've had many kids, so I've observed the dynamics over the years. Some, a while ago, Berkeley used to admit something like 60 people from this school day. It has a class of about 600 and now it admits more like 25 less than half, right? So it's like 4% but yeah, cut in half from 60 to less than 30, right?

Look up, for example, Mission High School in San Francisco. Okay, it's API score, it made some local headlines, it gets like it has 35% admitted Berkeley, while only 7% of its graduating class score proficient on this state testing register. There are some this school may be an outlier, but there is a general trend. So, but why is it relevant to what I'm telling you, because at schools like this local high school, it becomes almost impossible to get admitted to top university.

Actually, students need to do some super, super things, like take a lot of university classes on the side, get a get a plus, and them, so they push themselves extremely hard, and of course they become stronger in the program. Sure, I see the result in my Berkeley classes. I actually don't teach those gateway classes, I teach basically graduate classes. Okay, now I've been seeing more and more freshmen in my graduate classes, so this is amazing, students.

They're getting the credit in high school, so they're getting through their undergraduate, yeah, self-learn or whatnot. They come to graduate classes right away at Berkeley. They're not easy classes, and they do well in them. This has been very rare before.

We are seeing more of that, so the top students only become better because they're subject to discrimination, right, and that's what happens. So basically, our top students will be better than ever, right? Okay, there's just gonna be fewer of them, though, right? So the top students are better than ever, but if we're thinking about better than ever, but basically the other.

I don't know how many percent, I don't have the data, but a large percentage kind of mishandled, because basically we miss a large portion of students who should have been admitted to Berkeley, and instead they go maybe out of state, some out of country, right. So, basically, that is the situation. Sure. And so, if I'm an employer in California, and I've got more of my great talent coming out of high school and leaving my state, because for whatever reason they're not being admitted to one of the universities inside the state that they want to attend, so they choose to go out of state.

You've also got a challenge, I think. You correct me if I'm wrong. You talked about students having to take calculus three times to get through that. You talked about the attrition out of stem programs, or maybe switching into a less rigorous stem program.

So, if that's what's happening inside the university, for sure, I hear your message, which is because of this quote discrimination, the best of the best are even better. And so we've got this high level of talent, which, which makes sense, but we've also got a lot of students that should be surviving that STEM pathway and graduating with STEM degrees that aren't, because they're - it's not that, you know, it's not that they take 10 years to get out of school, they're self-selecting into a different path that enables them to graduate, you know, at the same time or sooner, but maybe is more in line with how they were prepared and what they were ready for when they got losing the students because they could have been these are very determined, hardworking kids, right?

They could have gotten into STEM workforce, could have been very successful, and they were failed by this misguided admissions, so we see the challenge. It's a huge challenge for employers. Employers are already seeing, I would imagine, the result of this, and if not, they're going to begin and continue to see this, this high level of talent coming out of the university system, but not enough of them in. Going to, that's going to create an issue, already is creating an issue for the workforce.

I want to talk a little bit about solutions here now. One of the things that you suggest in the open letter is more faculty oversight of the admissions process. Yeah, I guess it's two questions. What would that look like?

And, and then, you know, what are you hearing is the objections to that? Well, every country I'm familiar with, like, China, England, France, you name it. The admissions is done entirely by faculty. Interesting, it is actually systems are different because admissions is done to the major right away, and the faculty decide, they use the expertise, they decide who to admit.

Right? Makes sense. Sure, the admissions is outsourced to graduate of Critical Studies program in University of California, and they decide who to admit, right? And they make some right decision and many wrong decisions, right.

And so we want more say for the faculty. We don't want to look at the applications, but we want to set the standards. We want to say that below this level, we don't - we cannot teach people this is disservice to those people, this is disservice to us, this is disservice to the state. That is the minimum we want.

We also basically, because with the current admission trends, even if we reinstate the SAT, you know it can be given zero weight in the rubric, right? We want to determine how it is used, right? Sure. Well, we absolutely don't want to just admit students with the highest SAT.

We agree with some element of holistic admissions, to actually look for those students for from low socioeconomic backgrounds who didn't get high scores, despite never being taught. This is actually very impressive when this happens, because basically it shows self learning, and sure, yeah, we are absolutely for it, but we want some control on how this is used, because frankly, we don't trust our admissions anymore, and that, and then what you just said makes sense to me, right?

You want, you want influence over some minimum standards, you, you know, you don't necessarily want to control the process, you don't want to be sitting around the table looking at every application and comparing it to the criteria, and you're, you're certainly saying that the admissions decisions shouldn't be based entirely on academic data, that they need to be a factor, and there needs to be a lower, lowest minimum standard, so that the quality from an academic standpoint of the students that are entering the system, particularly in STEM pathways, is such that they can, they can compete and thrive once they get there, which also, by the way, sends a message to your secondary educators as well, right?

Who that says, look, there is this standard, and you know, you can't just hand out a, you know, a 4.0 to A minus students, or to, you know, what have you can't just hand out a minuses to students who aren't capable of living up to the standard from an academic standpoint, or they're getting, you know, they're going to struggle when they get the SATs, so that's a, it's, it's called the standardized test for a reason, it kind of standardizes the criteria, so, so I get that. How have you been responded to?

What are you hearing from, certainly, faculty program chairs, you mentioned K-12 teachers. Everybody's saying yes, we like this. Do you feel like you're being heard by the people that can actually make the change? Good question.

So we get a lot of support from mid-level academic leadership. I call it so many chairs, you saw that we keep the statistics. We have a number of deans side as individuals they didn't sign as deans, but we know we have a number of deans who signed it. We haven't heard from the top administration yet.

Made some attempts to connect. We did hear from the shared governance people from the Academic Senate, and it was not very.. did they write a letter, or did they just.. you respond verbally, or has been one response from the Chair of Academic Senate to our op-ed in Wall Street Journal?

You can look it up, which basically said everything is fine, what you're talking about, and everything goes through the process, and indeed, so we had the meeting with some leaders of some relevant committees, and we were basically yelled at for going kind of host outside the established pathways basically some leaders acted surprised and objected to the introduction of evidence and data, and said, "What are you talking about? We are the ones studying the data, and we'll take our time studying it, right?

Well, it's out there now, right, but you see. They already have taken their time in 2019 They took a year, they studied it, they produced the result, and this was disrespected. And now, what will happen? Will they study it again for another year, and will they keep studying it again and again until they produce the results that is politically acceptable to the leadership.

Right, we are seeing huge damage done to the real people, to the same people they're trying to lift. They're not lifting them up, exactly. Yep, so we feel that going through this established very slow bureaucratic pathways is not an option right now, it's we don't have time, I mean we need the talent, I mean that's you know as somebody who employs a lot of stem people from a wide variety of different stem disciplines, you know we need great talent and we need a lot of it and you know, for regardless of, and I am sure, if, if the, you know, folks from the Academic Senate, or others want to contact us, and you know, let their side of the story be known, we're, we're certainly wide open to listening to it, but one of the key questions I, I would have is, you know, what's the solution, I mean, if some of this data is accurate, and there's no reason for me to believe that it isn't, that you've got, you know, 25% of students that are in remedial math that got, you know, straight A's or 4.

0 or a minuses or whatever the average was while they were in high school, that you know that tells you that there's a there's a significant issue here. So we'd love to hear what they have to say, but you know, in the meantime, credit to you and into your co-author, whose name is.. I should, I should ask you that to make sure equal credit is available there. Who co-authored the open letter with you?

There were five people there, the first signers of the open letter. Okay, fair enough. So, at any rate, this has been a really fascinating conversation so far, Svetlana. I have two more questions for you.

You know, I think our audience has certainly heard what they heard and can do their homework and can make up their minds on, you know, what they think the issue is, and what they think you know what they think the solutions could be, but, but really thought-provoking conversation that we had here. Let's switch off the off the topic into some maybe less heady, more fun discussions. Maybe the first question isn't, I don't know, these are questions that we like to ask every single guest here on The TechEd podcast, and in question number one, based on your personal education journey, and you're somebody who's working right in, obviously, the field of higher education, are the things that you feel or believe about education that might surprise our listeners that we haven't already talked about, or some things that you feel are a little bit, maybe outside the lines of typical traditional education theory and belief.

Well, this is off topic, but I've been thinking a lot about the new AI landscape lately, and I believe that it would change education, but in a way that the good teachers, but only the good teachers, and I mean both K 12 and higher education will be one of the few AI proof and extremely important careers. Awesome, I love that. So, you're saying that the good teachers have jobs that are AI proof, and regardless of how far AI advances, whether we get to go ahead already have AI teachers.

They already have schools with AI teachers, and I think they will be part of the future, but they will replace bad teachers. Good teachers will be an air-proof profession, I think. Yeah. Awesome.

Are you using AI? You don't have to go into any details, but in terms of your coursework, and you know the way that you're preparing your.. I haven't been using it in education, but I am trying to use it a bit in my research. Yeah, awesome.

As are we. So, last question, and then then we'll wrap things up here on The TechEd Podcast. Another great question that we love to ask all of our, all of our guests here, Svetlana. If you could travel back in time and meet your 15 year old self and offer that 15 year old girl some advice, what would that advice be?

That would be definitely believe in yourself a lot more, and be more brave. Believe in yourself a lot more, be more brave. I don't know what could be braver than writing an open letter to the entire state of California, 15 year old anymore. Fair enough.

Absolutely. So, yeah, that was your 15 year old self, that is, that is so awesome. What a wonderful conversation. Svetlana, Professor of Mathematics at UC Berkeley, just absolutely fascinating topic for me.

Really enjoyed exploring it with you. And thanks so much for joining us here on The TechEd Podcast. Thank you very much. It has been a lot of fun, lots of fun for me as well, I'm sure, lots of fun for our audience, all kinds of things that Svetlana mentioned, she would like to share in the show notes.

We will link all of those up. You will find those at TechEd podcast.com/svetlana and that would be S V, as in Victor, e t l a n a. So, you'll find the show notes there.

When you're done there, check. Us out on social media, whether it's on TikTok, whether it's on LinkedIn, whether it's on Instagram, whether it's on YouTube, or Facebook, any place you go to check out your social media, you're going to find The TechEd Podcast. And as always, when you get there, reach out, say hello. We would love to hear from you, and we would love to see everybody back next week on The TechEd Podcast.

I am sure for another really fascinating episode, I can tell you this one in particular was a lot of fun for me. So, thanks for joining us, and see everybody next week. Until then, I am your host, Matt Kirchner. Thanks again for being with us.