According to The Harvard Crimson, Harvard will offer high-school-level math courses to its students. The remedial assistance has rekindled criticism over Harvard’s move away from standardized tests in making admissions decisions.
For years, Harvard has been accused of lowering admissions standards to achieve “equity” goals in its classes. The school opposed efforts to uncover its admissions data. When that data was ultimately revealed, sharp differences emerged based on race. The differences led to the historic decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, 600 U.S. 181 (2023) barring the use of race in college admissions.
As court decisions made it clear that the period of race-based criteria was coming to an end, systems like the University of California dumped standardized testing, while others decreased the reliance on such scores. Without standardized testing as an objective measure of comparison, challenges based on race would be more difficult to establish.
Critics have raised that history in light of the recent announcement. It would have been unthinkable in prior years for Harvard to offer remedial high-school-level courses for admitted students.
Nevertheless, Harvard’s director of introductory math, Brendan Kelly, told The Harvard Crimson that the cause was the pandemic. He said that Harvard students “don’t have the skills that we had intended downstream in the curriculum. We want to make sure that students are on a path to success starting from their first day.”