Professor Zvezdelina Stankova likes to share a photo from the early days of the Berkeley Math Circle: her students presenting then-California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger with a Klein bottle, a glass object whose inside and outside are the same surface. He had no idea what it was, so Stankova explained that if he poured wine into it, he’d never get it out.
“He turned to his assistant, gave him the Klein bottle, and said, ‘Investigate and report tomorrow,’ like the Terminator,” she told IW Features. “And the kids were laughing.”
Stankova has spent decades teaching math at the collegiate level, both at Berkeley and at Mills College. Beyond that, she has spent nearly 30 years building one of the country’s best pipelines for young mathematical talent: the Berkeley Math Circle, an after-school program where research mathematicians teach advanced problem-solving to kids in grades 5 through 12, well beyond anything in a typical school curriculum.
These days, however, in addition to her already busy workload, Stankova is fighting a university bureaucracy that she said is undermining her life’s work at both ends: shutting down programs for mathematically gifted kids while admitting students who are not prepared for the mathematical rigor at a place like UC Berkeley.
She began noticing just how much things had changed just over three years ago, as California began lowering standards for high schoolers—who were now heading to college.
“For me, the changes started in Spring ’23,” she told IW Features. “Until then, I had taught maybe second-year and upper-division classes since COVID, so I did not see what was happening because these were kids who got in with the SAT before it was dropped. But the first time I truly experienced the new cohorts was Spring ’23, when I was teaching Calculus 2, the second semester.”
Quickly, she realized, her class had split into thirds.
“You have the upper one-third: they are amazing students, they are prepared, they are ready to fly,” she said. “The middle third is not prepared well, but we can try—and we do try—to prepare them. But the bottom third was an issue where it was like the floor was taken out. They were in a free fall.”
That bottom third, she noticed, didn’t understand basic algebra or precalculus, and had largely stopped coming to lectures or turning in homework. On the midterm examination, some earned what she called “an honest zero,” missing even the most elementary questions.
One struggling student asked her how to keep up. She suggested reading the textbook ahead of lectures.
“’I post ahead of time what sections in the textbook we will cover, so why don’t you read the textbook ahead of time so you have a structure in your head? You don’t have to understand everything, just some structure, and when you come to class, it won’t be that alien. After class, you will have to review the lecture slides,’” she told the student. “The answer was: ‘I cannot read.’ Meaning, ‘I cannot understand the mathematics. Therefore, I watch videos.'”
Stankova and four Berkeley colleagues wrote an open letter urging the university to restore the SAT and ACT as an admissions requirement. It has since been signed by thousands of faculty and five Nobel laureates. Her August op-ed in the San Francisco Standard, which warned that “some students are five to eight years behind in mathematics,” went viral.
But restoring the SAT is only one of the letter’s four asks. The others call for faculty oversight of admissions, transparency studies, and new admissions criteria based on what those studies find.
These admissions criteria are key, because that is where the primary bottleneck is occurring that is leading to the problems Stankova is seeing.
“Every campus has their own admissions committee of faculty members,” she said. “But that admissions committee is not the admissions committee who accepts students. There is a firewall between them on most campuses, in the sense that the faculty admissions committee does not know what is happening in admissions and does not have an impact on those criteria.”
“For instance,” she continued, “when a mathematical star applies to Berkeley and gets rejected, we receive a lot of letters. They write to us: ‘We were rejected from all UC campuses, and I have a gold medal in the International Physics or Computing Olympiad. How come? Am I not good enough? Didn’t the math department see my achievements?’ And the answer is: I saw zip. I don’t see your file; we have no impact on admissions.”
She added, “Admissions are done by administrators who are not mathematicians, and some of them, unfortunately, are very anti-STEM.”
With grades inflated and essays increasingly written by AI, Stankova and her colleagues turned to looking at student profiles based on the one standardized measure left: the Smarter Balanced test.
“It is given to 11th graders in all public California schools, proctored by teachers. It is very easy compared to the SAT and does not have any pre-calculus; it’s a diagnostic test to measure a school’s proficiency in math and English. What we noticed is an anti-correlation—a negative correlation—between the overall proficiency of schools on that test and the admission rates from those schools to UCs. Until you see the diagrams, you would not believe it,” she told IW Features.
At one California high school she analyzed, 93% of students failed the test, yet 45% of its students who applied to Berkeley were accepted — around four times the campus’s overall acceptance rate of about 11%. That meant at least two dozen students who failed a test that is easier than the SAT entered one of the world’s most rigorous STEM programs.
“What are those kids going to do?” she asked.
California used to have an answer: under its Master Plan, students not ready for higher education could catch up at community college and transfer. But these days, community colleges have cut out remedial math, right as UC campuses are admitting more and more unqualified students. Beyond that, the load on professors like Stankova has increased in other ways. Just before this semester, a roughly 20% budget cut nearly cost Stankova her graduate student instructor, although she managed to get one eventually.
“I cannot teach remedial math because I have the other two-thirds of the class there, and I would hurt them too,” since those kids don’t need remedial math, she said. “Berkeley is not the place where anyone should be learning remedial math.”
And because Berkeley is admitting students who aren’t ready, it is shutting out those who are: the Math Circle’s upper division no longer runs on campus because of university bureaucracy.
This is cutting past an extremely successful pipeline that Stankova has spent her career building. Because of Stankova, Hannah Cairo took graduate courses at Berkeley, and went on to disprove a 40-year-old conjecture at the age of 17. Cairo went straight to a Ph.D. program at the University of Maryland. Berkeley’s Ph.D. program, Stankova noted, rejected Cairo.
“If the UC system proclaims that they are for social mobility,” Stankova said, “they need to stand by that commitment and keep these top programs for high schoolers.”
For years, Stankova said, she felt like she had no ability to say anything about what she was seeing.
“It is an atmosphere where bureaucrats have taken over admissions and decision-making for youth programs. I felt I could not speak freely for years until our open letter came out, which received overwhelming support from faculty and the public worldwide,” she said.
“We originally thought our letter would just get a hundred signatures from mathematicians,” she added. “But it turned out to be an overarching issue troubling the whole world.”
