SAN DIEGO — UC San Diego says it’s struggling to deal with a large and growing number of freshmen whose math skills are below middle-school level, leaving many unprepared to thrive at an institution famed for its teaching and research in science, medicine and engineering.

This fall, 665 students — 8.5% of incoming freshmen — were placed in Math 2, a remedial course meant for students who aren’t prepared for a foundational course in precalculus, according to a campus report issued Nov. 6. Five years ago, 32 students, or 0.5% of freshmen, did the same.

In one assessment test, some students failed to answer a simple addition question, and some could not round off the number 374,518 to the nearest hundred.

The report — which offers possible fixes — says many students are struggling even though they completed the math classes they needed to take to qualify for admission to the University of California. Many also were found to have trouble with language and writing.

The rise in math-challenged students “coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects on education, the elimination of standardized testing, grade inflation, and the expansion of admissions from under-resourced high schools,” the report says.

“The combination of these factors has produced an incoming class increasingly unprepared for the quantitative and analytical rigor expected at UC San Diego.”

The report notes that similar problems have surfaced at some other UC campuses. Other reports say this is a nationwide problem.

UCSD found no comfort in that.

“Admitting large numbers of students who are profoundly underprepared risks harming the very students we hope to support, by setting them up for failure,” the report says.

“It also puts significant strain on faculty who work to maintain rigorous instructional standards. Especially now, when our resources become more constrained, we cannot take on more remedial education than we can responsibly and effectively deliver.”

The problem is complicated by the size and focus of UCSD, the country’s seventh-largest research school.

Few universities have had the sort of explosive growth that UCSD has experienced since Pradeep Khosla became chancellor in 2012. Enrollment rose by roughly 16,000 and now stands at about 45,000. The majority of those students are majoring in fields that involve science, technology, mathematics and medicine.

The engineering school alone has more than 10,000 students.

This has led to ever more pressure to offer courses in math, often referred to as the only “universal language.”

The percentage of California high school students qualifying for admission to the UC has also been growing. Many of those students have applied to UCSD, which has spent billions on dorms, labs and classrooms to help the UC system meet unprecedented demand for admission.

Most of the demand is coming from California. The UC system offered admission to more than 100,000 California residents for this fall, a record.

The new report clearly states that UCSD needs to find better ways to identify which new students will likely need remedial math. Among other things, it proposes “using historical placement data and transcript-based variables (coursework, grades, high school attended)” as part of the process.

“Faculty in large numbers identified a new and concerning trend and spoke up,” the university said in a statement. “A workgroup composed of faculty and administrators carefully studied the problem, produced a report with recommendations, and posted it so that all of our faculty could weigh in.

“In the coming weeks, various Senate and administrative groups will review the report and propose how best to respond to its recommendations.”

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