A San Francisco highschool the place college students get prime grades merely for displaying up now has the very best acceptance price within the state to the celebrated College of California, Berkeley — as critics blame rampant grade inflation and rock-bottom requirements for a surge in ill-prepared faculty college students who find yourself dropping out.
Mission Excessive Faculty had a forty five% acceptance price into the elite college, with 34 out of its 76 candidates gaining admission final fall, far forward of the state common of 15%, in keeping with information compiled by the San Francisco Chronicle.
But it surely’s not due to superior teachers, critics say, however reasonably due to low requirements and a lefty coverage that eradicated SAT testing necessities within the College of California system, sending a flood of scholars who can barely do fractions into demanding programs like Calculus.
“Grades have been typically too simple to earn,” Levi Lum of Mission Excessive informed the San Francisco Customary.
“In lots of required lessons, attendance and fundamental completion might be sufficient to obtain a grade that might ordinarily sign robust proficiency.”
Solely 17% of Mission Excessive’s eleventh graders scored proficient or above in English, together with a surprising 6% in math on the 2025 state evaluation examination, the bottom of any college within the San Francisco Unified Faculty District — which averaged 59% and 43%, respectively.
San Francisco resident Liz Le is amongst many who’ve famous the academically rigorous Lowell Excessive Faculty, the place round 71% met math requirements, has a decrease acceptance price within the College of California system than Mission Excessive.
“UCs punish Lowell college students for working onerous due to their race, whereas organising Mission children up for failure & despair,” stated Le, who claimed “race-based admissions fails all children.”
Though College of California can’t legally contemplate race in admissions choices, its choice in 2020 to drop SAT and ACT testing necessities as a part of a settlement was offered as a bid to advertise fairness, as non-white candidates usually rating decrease than white ones.
Mission Excessive has a big pupil inhabitants who’re socioeconomically deprived.
College students on the college typically have excessive GPAs, however critics say lax grading requirements merely set them up for failure.
Lum added that at Berkeley, he was behind in mathematical fluency and struggled to maintain tempo with classes. Lessons moved sooner than he was used to, he stated.
Simply half of Mission Excessive’s college students graduated from a College of California college inside 4 years, the Customary reported.
The discrepancy between admission statistics and proficiency requirements is one cause why many professors are calling for the UCs to re-implement standardized testing for admissions.
1000’s of college members signed open letters earlier this 12 months calling for the restoration of the SAT and ACT.
The change has introduced up unhappy examples of school college students needing to be taught fundamental math as an alternative of the particular curriculum.
“Some college students are 5 to eight years behind in arithmetic. Workplace hours that must be spent discussing integrals as an alternative develop into classes on fractions and fundamental algebra you’ll anticipate college students to be taught in center college,” wrote math professor Zvezdelina Stankova, of UC Berkeley, in an op-ed piece.
Final 12 months, The UC San Diego Senate-Administration Working Group launched a surprising report that discovered a 30-fold enhance in college students who lacked fundamental math expertise.
Simply 30 of the varsity’s incoming freshmen had below-high-school-level math expertise in 2020. In 2025, that quantity rose to 900, the report discovered.
Mission Excessive Faculty’s principal declined to remark to the Customary.
A UC Berkeley spokesperson confirmed that Mission Excessive’s excessive acceptance price has held “for the previous couple of years” however insisted “a specific technique to focus on a person college” doesn’t exist.
