Harvard University: The Ivy League teaching remedial math
Harvard might be America’s most elite university — but now it’s offering remedial math classes.
The school’s math department is providing a new scaled-back math class for freshmen who are apparently arriving on campus lacking “foundational skills” in high school math basics like geometry and algebra.
Harvard is quick to blame these math gaps on pandemic learning losses — but, in truth, administrators brought this mess on themselves by scrapping standardized testing requirements during the pandemic, all in the name of equity.
Without any SAT or ACT scores on their applications, no wonder kids without basic math skills were able to slip through the cracks. The school should have seen this coming.
When the remedial program’s pilot was announced in September, Harvard’s director of introductory math, Brendan Kelly, told The Harvard Crimson that they were seeing students facing “a challenge that was unreasonable given the supports we had in the [regular] course” in the wake of the pandemic.
“Students don’t have the skills that we had intended downstream in the curriculum,” Kelly added. “We want to make sure that students are on a path to success starting from their first day.”
The new course, called Math MA, is one year long and meets five days a week, compared with the regular two days. According to the department’s website, “extra support will target foundational skills in algebra, geometry, and quantitative reasoning that will help [students] unlock success.”
Had these students studied for the SATs — which, according to the College Board website, tests them on four “areas of math that play the biggest role in college and career success: algebra, advanced math, problem solving .?.?. and geometry” — they wouldn’t need Math MA.
Instead, many of them probably bombed on the math SAT or skipped the whole thing altogether, taking advantage of the fact that Harvard scrapped the standardized testing requirement during the pandemic.
Perhaps that was reasonable in 2020, when the nation was still effectively in lockdown and in-person testing was logistically challenging, but there’s no excuse for the class of 2030 still reaping the benefit of test-optional admissions.
Harvard was capitulating to the pressure of those who insisted standardized testing is a vestige of racism and argued that scrapping the process altogether would advance equity.
As 2020 antiracist icon Ibram X. Kendi put it: “We still think there’s something wrong with the kids rather than recognizing there’s something wrong with the tests. Standardized tests have become the most effective racist weapon ever devised to objectively degrade black and brown minds and legally exclude their bodies from prestigious schools.”
But, much like Kendi’s $55 million antiracist center at Boston University turning out to be a bust born out of a pandemic-era moral panic, so too was the case against standardized testing. To Harvard’s credit, the school announced in April last year that it is finally bringing back standardized testing requirements for the class of 2031.
“Reinstating this requirement brings important information back into the admissions process,” the school admitted — after continuously extending their test-optional policy for no good reason.
Perhaps they were inspired to change course when they heard that their colleagues over at Harvard’s Department of Mathematics felt cornered into starting a baby math section for the freshmen they accepted.
Yes, pandemic learning loss is very real — and the kids who suffered from school closures deserve sympathy. But certainly Harvard University, with its 54,000 applications for just 1,647 spots in the incoming class, can afford to pick the kids who retained basic algebra.
Had they kept standardized testing all along, they’d have been easily identifiable, and the embarrassment of starting a remedial math class would have been completely avoidable.
Hopefully our nation’s other premier universities will wake up to the clear utility of standardized testing, too. While Harvard has seen the light, elite colleges like Columbia, Princeton, Vanderbilt and Duke are still clinging to their test-optional policies.
When even Harvard has to roll out the times tables, it’s clear that putting equity over meritocracy is a losing strategy.
