Roughly one in five Americans entering UC San Diego cannot write at an entry level standard, a new report revealed.
About 20 percent of incoming students to the California university had to be placed in analytical writing courses after failing to meet the requirements of a writing placement exam, which forced them into specialized courses called ‘AWP’.
The report published by a UC San Diego admissions committee added that writing skills and literacy are in decline across the entire US.
According to the university’s faculty, freshmen students’ vocabulary was ‘increasingly’ limiting their ability to engage with longer and harder texts.
As a whole, the school had seen a ‘steep decline in the academic preparation’ of its domestic freshmen students.
The November 6 report read: ‘Admitting large numbers of students who are profoundly underprepared risks harming the very students we hope to support, by setting them up for failure.’
One possible solution offered was ‘moving beyond GPA and course titles’ in high school to evaluate how ready students actually are for writing at a college level.
Hellbound and Down 