Students are doing worse than you think

Print headline: “Class struggle.” Subhead: Some at college or university are testing no better than ten-year-olds.

The alarm from California

• Over 1,800 maths and science lecturers at the University of California signed an open letter: first-year undergrads increasingly arrive without basic skills.
• At Berkeley, 20–30% of students in an early calculus course show “severe preparation deficits”; instructors are having to reteach middle-school maths.
• A November report from UC San Diego found first-year students entering with maths skills below high-school level had risen nearly thirtyfold in five years, to almost one in eight. ~70% of lagging students weren’t performing at the level expected of a 14-year-old.
• Literacy worries mirror this: at Harvard, some humanities/social-science professors feel compelled to shorten texts; students arrive “with less experience reading complex prose” and struggle with readings peers handled easily ten years ago.

The hard data (OECD Survey of Adult Skills)

• Post-secondary learners rarely sit standardised exams, so evidence is often anecdotal. The OECD’s once-a-decade “Survey of Adult Skills” offers harder data — testing practical literacy and numeracy across dozens of countries (2024 round: ~160,000 people).
• The Economist isolated data for enrolled tertiary students under 35.
• Across rich countries, about 8% of tertiary students score no better in literacy than a ten-year-old — roughly the same for numeracy. The share at/below this bar has risen since the last round; very poor literacy performers have more than doubled.
• Wide country variation: fewer than 2% score at the bottom in Estonia, rising to a fifth in Poland (literacy) and a quarter in Chile (maths).
• US among the worst: one in seven tertiary students scored at/below primary-school level in literacy (up from ~1 in 20 a decade ago); nearly one in five at/below the bottom for numeracy. Britain is above average and improving.

”Every child left behind” — causes in schools

• Universities inherit problems from schools. The pandemic was huge: national closures averaged 20 weeks; some students seemed to have “not gone to high school.”
• But decline predated covid: US NAEP scores peaked in the early 2010s and have edged down; international PISA scores are drifting down in many countries (deep declines in France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand).
• Debated causes: rising migration (newcomers poorer, more likely to speak another language at home); traditionalists blame watered-down testing/accountability and “soft-skill” curricula; screen time displacing reading (share of US nine-year-olds reading for pleasure fell from ~60% in the 1990s to 37%). The OECD sees literacy declines even among older adults.

Universities marking their own homework

• Colleges control their own admissions and have often failed to hold standards high — especially as the number of 18-year-olds nears/passes its peak, making it harder to resist diluting standards rather than downsizing. Shrinking systems correlate with collecting more low-scoring students.
• Dropped entry tests: before the pandemic, over half of US bachelor’s-granting universities required the SAT/ACT; now as few as 10%. Justified by covid-era safety and bias claims, but critics say it eased manipulation of campus demographics and lowered rigour.
• Weakening alternative signals: application essays are “worth next to nothing” now they’re easily AI-generated (per Berkeley’s Mina Aganagic); high-school grades are inflating, with states lowering graduation thresholds. About a quarter of students sent to San Diego’s weakest remedial maths class had perfect high-school maths scores. Admissions is becoming a “black box.”

Grade inflation in higher education

• Britain: ~30% of bachelor’s students got a first-class degree in 2025, up from 7% in 1995.
• Yale: 79% of grades were A or A- in 2022-23 (vs 67% in 2010-11) — lowest in economics (~50%), above 80% in humanities/ethnic/education studies. Senior Yale academics said grade inflation has rendered the system “almost meaningless as an academic measure.”
• A Harvard dean’s report frankly detailed pressures: students who never got a mediocre mark now appeal grades; academics fear tough marking hurts enrollment and their own careers (student evaluations matter for promotion). Group projects and trends like “ungrading”/“contract-based learning” (A-grades for completing assigned work) also play a role.

”CheatGPT” — AI’s contribution

• Britain: 94% of undergrads report using AI for assessed work (HEPI, March); 12% admitted pasting AI-generated text directly into coursework, up from 3% in 2024. Nearly half of STEM students (and a quarter of humanities students) judged AI content would “get a good grade.”
• US 2023-24: about two-thirds of public-university learners used AI; an estimated 9% used it to cheat, highest for economics (17%) and journalism (16%) students — “surely much higher now,” says Igor Chirikov (Berkeley).
• Chirikov’s working paper (500,000 grades at a big Texas university, 2018–2025): top marks in AI-friendly subjects (writing, coding) soared since ChatGPT’s late-2022 launch — the share of “A” grades rose 13 percentage points (~30% above baseline), with no similar inflation where AI isn’t useful.

Responses and resignation

• Academics distrust AI-detection tools and risk much from false fraud accusations: “You can’t ban a tool that you are also expected to teach” (Chirikov).
• Many are reintroducing invigilated/proctored assessments, but administrators resist over space and staffing.
• The Economist’s closing warning: some academics shrug that students may no longer need strong basic skills since future work will involve tweaking AI output — “That is not pragmatism; it is surrender.”