Colleges across the country are grappling with the same problem as academic setbacks from the pandemic follow students to campus. At many universities, engineering and biology majors are struggling to grasp fractions and exponents. More students are being placed into pre-college math, starting a semester or more behind for their majors, even if they get credit for the lower-level classes.
Colleges largely blame the disruptions of the pandemic, which had an outsize impact on math. Reading scores on the national test known as NAEP plummeted, but math scores fell further, by margins not seen in decades of testing. Other studies find that recovery has been slow.
It is 100% the fault of educators. Actual mathematicians have derided the abysmal state of math education for literal decades. But they don’t get to decide how we “educate” children. US educators unabashedly focus exclusively on testing for funding. They don’t give a rats ass if you know the simplest amount of trivial math—they do really really care if you pass a bizarrely arbitrary arithmetic test though. Why do think those mini-viral bullshit PEMDAS/BEMDAS memes track on Reddit. It’s deranged math students that think an order of operations is actually used in real math (real shock: they aren’t, mathematics doesn’t have an order of operations).