Johnny can't read (or count), but he's off to college anyway.

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Professors at top California college forced to radically alter coursework as students struggle to read

Published June 11, 2026, 8:18 p.m. ET

Humanities professors at one of California’s most prestigious universities say they are assigning fewer pages, replacing full books with excerpts and rethinking coursework as students increasingly struggle to keep up with reading-heavy classes.

The concerns, raised by faculty at University of California, Berkeley, come amid a broader debate across the University of California about whether incoming students are arriving on campus academically prepared for college-level work.

Several professors told student newspaper The Daily Californian that reading expectations have steadily declined over the past two decades, prompting some instructors to scale back assignments in order to maintain meaningful classroom discussions.

Carlos Noreña, a history professor specializing in ancient history, said the amount of reading he can reasonably assign has fallen dramatically since he joined the Berkeley faculty in 2005.

“We are now reaching a crisis point where if the number (of pages) goes down further, it’s unclear to me whether my discipline of history can really be taught,” Noreña said.

According to Noreña, upper-division students once received roughly 100 pages of reading each week, with professors expecting them to complete most of the material. For a course he plans to teach this fall, that number will be closer to 35 pages per week.

Other professors reported making similar adjustments.

“Part of this is to spare students the cost of purchasing books, but part of it is also acquiescing to my sense of — and complaints about — the amount of reading assigned, though those complaints, curiously, haven’t gone away as I’ve shrunk the number of pages assigned,” Brilliant said.

And then there’s AI: ….

Some professors also expressed concern about students relying on artificial intelligence tools to summarize texts instead of engaging directly with the material.

“I found that very upsetting, because I’ve read the AI summary of my own book, and it’s all wrong,” history professor Trevor Jackson said. “Even a good summary is still not grappling with the text.”

The discussion comes as UC faculty elsewhere have raised alarms about academic preparedness in other subjects.

On Thursday, the University of California announced it will study whether to reinstate SAT and ACT testing requirements, six years after eliminating them from admissions the LA Times reported.

The review follows mounting pressure from more than 1,400 faculty members who argue that many students are entering college without the skills needed for rigorous coursework.

In a recent open letter, professors warned that preparation gaps have become so severe that some instructors are reteaching basic math concepts while attempting to cover college-level material.

The concerns were echoed in a 2025 report from University of California, San Diego that found a sharp increase in incoming students whose math abilities tested below high school levels.

How bad is the situation? Even a leftist rag like the Atlantic has (finally) noticed (and admits it:

Atlantic: The UC System Made a Mistake Getting Rid of the SAT

John Sexton, HotAir:

The Atlantic is pretty late to this particular party. Both David and I have been writing about this topic since last fall. In any case, they published a story yesterday titled, "The University of California System’s SAT Folly."'

"The University of California System’s SAT Folly."'

Zvezdelina Stankova has taught mathematics at UC Berkeley for nearly three decades. But in 2023, while teaching introductory calculus for the first time since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, she noticed that something was quite wrong. The bottom 25 percent of students were not just struggling with the coursework, Stankova told me; “people were in freefall.” Teaching was becoming impossible. “With one hand, I am teaching a complex integral, and with the other hand, I am telling them how to solve a simple linear equation like 7x – 2 = 5,” Stankova said.

Mina Aganagic, a string theorist at Berkeley who has taught calculus for 20 years, noticed something similar. “I realized that for students to follow me,” she told me, “I had to start reviewing basic algebra stuff, like fractions.” The lack of mathematical fluency, Aganagic said, extended even to “the meaning of equals in an equation.” Both professors said their students came to office hours and still tried hard to pass—often by trying to commit equations to memory when they could not understand them. But however hard they worked, most of the students who arrived to calculus class without knowing algebra failed.

Sexton:

“The obvious question, the one that anyone would ask, is why? And the answer to that question is no mystery. The UC system did away with SATs, not simply making them optional but forbidding students to submit them.

“That is the practical explanation for why many incoming UC students can't do high school (or middle school) math, but it's not the final explanation. It doesn't explain the motive behind the decision to ditch the SAT. To his credit, the author doesn't dodge the real explanation.”

…. Sexton: “I wrote about this last November when a UC Berkeley professor wrote an opinion piece for Inside Higher Ed rejecting the need for the SAT. As Saul Geiser sees it, the decision to drop the SAT has been a good one because now there are more Black and Hispanic students at UC schools.”

At the top of the applicant pool— where the chance of admission is greatest—Latinos and Blacks comprised 23 percent of the top GPA tier but only 5 percent of the top SAT tier. Similar differences were found for low-income and first-generation applicants. Far from leveling the playing field, the SAT steepens the climb.

Sexton: “As I argued at the time, this does not prove that GPA is a better metric for admissions, only that it is easier to get A's than to get high SAT scores.”

“Schools and even individual teachers within schools grade classes differently, especially in the wake of the pandemic. Some schools and teachers give out A's like candy and do their best not to fail anyone. Other schools and teachers are much more competitive and actually make kids work pretty hard for top grades.

“And it's not just the grades that differ. One calculus class might go through 50% of the material in a given year. Another class might get through 90% of the material in that same year. In that case, getting an A in the first class is going to be a breeze compared to getting an A in the second class. In fact, a kid who got a B in a tough class with no curve might actually know the material better than a kid who got an A in an easy class with a teacher who curves every test.

“My point here is that grades and expectations from school to school may differ widely, but SAT tests do not. With the SAT, everyone is getting more or less the same test at the same exact time. 

“So I think what the chart above is showing is that, if you really test students from different schools with one consistent standard (the SAT), you'll find out that a lot of the kids with top grades at Podunk High can't get top test scores because they haven't actually learned that much. (A top 10% test score on the SAT would be 1350 or above)...

…. “The Atlantic piece seems to confirm my own intuition about this:”

Grade inflation has, after all, eroded the signaling value of a strong high-school transcript: More than 25 percent of those taking UC San Diego’s remedial math course in 2024 had a 4.0 GPA in high-school math.

…. Sexton: “To bring this back to where we started, the result is a bunch of incoming students who were accepted based on their 4.0 GPA's but who can't do middle school math.”