When Grades Stop Meaning Anything

The question that captured the world’s attention was 7 + 2 = [_] + 6. There’s no trick; it’s as easy as it looks. The answer is 3.

The question was posed to students in the University of California San Diego’s (UCSD) fast-growing remedial math class, Math 2, and one-quarter of them got it wrong, according to a UCSD Senate-Administration Workgroup on Admissions report.

UCSD, one of the country’s best public universities, has offered remedial math for nearly a decade — but lately, the share of students requiring it has skyrocketed. In the fall of 2020, 32 students took Math 2. In the fall of 2025, fully 1,000 students had math placement scores so low they would need it.1

In fact, many of the students didn’t just need remedial high school math — their scores indicated they needed remedial middle school or even elementary school math. Only 39% of the students in the remedial class knew how to “round the number 374518 to the nearest hundred.”