The agenda is to get them university degees irregardless of their capabilities and exclude those others from getting degrees to create to upper managerial and professional class the DEIB social engineers want to create. I was just out there in Cal and roaming the halls of a major corporation where the vision is complete and the clock is ticking on the situation unravelling from the lack of substance.
We've been boarded by Marxists and they're no longer lurking in the liberal arts but worked their way into all departments and run the institutions. I knew a EE PhD who lived in fear of being overheard in public having less than woke thoughts for the damage it would do to his career path.
Far Left infestation equals wide spread stupidity, and then worse- violence and mass death.
I read something recently about IQ of graduates by major and it was even more scary - Some majors in soft subjects had an average graduate IQ under 90. I thought this couldn't be true at the time but it is consistent with this article :-(
I was shocked, half a century ago to learn that my university had dumbed down freshman calculus (the lowest math course then offered), by splitting the first semester into two semesters. About a decade ago, I helped an online friend understand GCD and LCM in her college Algebra class. This is on the same trajectory.
If people expected to pay their way through college without student loans, would they really see college as worth their while if they are reading and computing on a fifth grade level?
The idea (originating in the LBJ administration) that college is the best path to success was based on a fundamental understanding of why college grads had higher average salaries than those with just high school diplomas - it wasn't because they had the degrees; it was that the most advanced students and those from the most successful families were most likely to attend college in the first place. This error, combined with sneers at trade school graduates has led to this mess. One can hardly blame the colleges for their willingness to cater to whomever is willing to pay to attend.
Some high schools don’t offer trig, especially rural ones, so calculus really shouldn’t be the lowest math class offered; but by God students should know basic algebra going into college
Being a Brit, when I read the word 'kids' I always assume we are talking about 7-year-olds. When the word refers to college students who must be 18-years-old at least i.e. people who typically have already had a couple of sexual partners, smoked dope and passed their driving license, the word 'kid' sounds not quite right, like describing a komodo dragon as 'a pet'.
I have mixed feelings about this usage myself, but my stance is that if 20 years olds insist on being infantilized to this degree I'm not going to stand in their way.
Maybe we should start calling them 'toddlers' and see if they embrace it or are outraged. If the former, we are in real trouble. If the latter, it might prompt them to shape up.
On a related note, I notice that when young people commit crimes they are often referred to as children yet when the question of lowering the voting age comes around the word children mysteriously disappears.
Well, when liberals couldn't bring the bottom up, rig the numbers, dumb the classes down enough, they decided to take the top performers down to create the "equality" they want. When smart kids escaped to AP classes they put the incapable disruptive kids in thise classes too. So, everyone is dumber, even the kids teachers in school are dumber than ever and only enforce rules upon the white and asian kids, letting the others disrupt and cheat.
Liberals are at fault bc it's what they wanted to create in their sick minds.
There’s a couple of things at play. I saw firsthand the significant decline in writing skills when I was a professor at a major university just before and during the pandemic. With language arts you can perhaps explain issues away by hand waving at personal tastes and preferences (although I would argue punctuation, spelling, and using verbs in sentences isn’t subjective). There was always an indication that standards were slipping.
I suspect this issue reflects another cause, pushing students through regardless of performance. With family and friends I’ve seen how being held back a grade due to poor performance is now a parental choice, and most times teachers won’t even offer it. Where one would see the educational disruption of COVID as making it easier to hold back a student who is understandably delayed the opposite is the case.
Resetting the relationship between teacher and parent regarding making assessments and decisions regarding student performance will be a necessary first step in solving this, but that is only a start.
The highlighted examples are very instructive, because they show a large decline in success rate for "word problems" vs straightforward "textbook problems". This suggests that the primary failure of these students is understanding and applying the rote mathematics.
It has long been suggested that "word problems" are "racist" because people with poor English skills might fail them due to comprehension errors, not genuine "math errors". I'm not inclined to be terribly generous here; if you can't comprehend real-world applications, then any "math" skills are functionally useless.
The MPO solution feels like rearranging deck chairs when the core issue is removing objective measurment altogether. That 0.19 GPA spread between calculus-ready and basic algebra deficiency shows why holistic review without standardized tests creates unpredictable outcomes. Universities can prioritize access or maintain rigorous standars, but pretending you can do both without tradeoffs is how you end up teaching fractions to freshmen.
Interestingly enough, the report mentions how the math placement process does take SAT scores into account, so they do understand the utility of standardized testing, but only after admissions apparently.
It's amazing how many people with PhDs in math-intensive subjects will insist that gatekeeping is some kind of sin. Equality of opportunity is a nonsensical ideal once you realize that people can't all take advantage of the same ones.
Seems to me that the real problem is not university acceptance criteria, but the failure of all the previous schools to teach these skills. Even someone with a predicted genetic IQ of 80 is perfectly capable of learning how to do basic arithmetic if given competent education. *Nobody* should be getting out of high school in such a state. I can't fault the universities too much for taking pity on students who have been failed so utterly and trying to give them what they need.
These kids graduated top of their class too. The UC system is mandated to take the top 10% or so of California graduates. This is not an IQ issue. This is an indictment of California’s primary and secondary school systems.
(Of course it's antisocial to help them at the cost of smarter kids who could contribute more to society, but it's no more antisocial than e.g. giving money to a homeless person rather than donating it to effective charity, or any number of other things that are totally normal in our culture.)
Federal, state, and corporate money controls the agendas in these schools. The staff works to keep the obligations that were imposed and will be needed to get more money.
When they're told X number of Y students will be graduating, in honors or high GPA, they get to work on making it so in every kind of way.
The good people and teachers leave if they can or stay and become demoralized.
The state and feds pick up those kids delivered from the high schools and drop them into the next institutions to deal with where money and pressure repeats.
It's a sickness.
Imagine there's a new emloyee working on a safety system at your local nuclear power plant. They clearly don't feel right or fit because instead of the path we all followed to get to that point they recieved a lot of "help" but you can't say or do anything because you will face consequences for your problem with it. You ask them, What is this we're working on? They don't know. What are we fixing and doing to this system to make it work? They don't know. How does this system work? They don't know and worse, they have a look and attitude of not caring about your stupid questions even though they're being paid the same as you. This creates a shock and resentment that you will eat. Luckily, there's enough people still around who do know the answers to those questions, and get the system fixed and working properly, but we're getting older. This is the future? Terrifying. Which nuclear plant is this? Won't say. But it's more than just a few and the trend is not good. It feels intentional.
In CA I teach the new upper division math requirememt. 20% attrition normal.
There are Freshman admitted who cannot read, it is not a shock they fail at math. Not bad people, but they shouldn't be in university.
The agenda is to get them university degees irregardless of their capabilities and exclude those others from getting degrees to create to upper managerial and professional class the DEIB social engineers want to create. I was just out there in Cal and roaming the halls of a major corporation where the vision is complete and the clock is ticking on the situation unravelling from the lack of substance.
We've been boarded by Marxists and they're no longer lurking in the liberal arts but worked their way into all departments and run the institutions. I knew a EE PhD who lived in fear of being overheard in public having less than woke thoughts for the damage it would do to his career path.
Far Left infestation equals wide spread stupidity, and then worse- violence and mass death.
People just want to opine about what they seen on screens without consequence.
Get into modern political emotion, wreck will follow in train.
If one sticks to their field, teaches true things, there are still those who speak truth.
Cowards will hide, always.
But do they think there are dinosaurs roaming around the San Diego campus?
[16 seconds of breathing as Student stares at the box in Q1]”I’ll just skip that one”
I read something recently about IQ of graduates by major and it was even more scary - Some majors in soft subjects had an average graduate IQ under 90. I thought this couldn't be true at the time but it is consistent with this article :-(
Yes, I originally planned to include some shocking statistics along these lines but decided to save it for another article.
I was shocked, half a century ago to learn that my university had dumbed down freshman calculus (the lowest math course then offered), by splitting the first semester into two semesters. About a decade ago, I helped an online friend understand GCD and LCM in her college Algebra class. This is on the same trajectory.
If people expected to pay their way through college without student loans, would they really see college as worth their while if they are reading and computing on a fifth grade level?
The idea (originating in the LBJ administration) that college is the best path to success was based on a fundamental understanding of why college grads had higher average salaries than those with just high school diplomas - it wasn't because they had the degrees; it was that the most advanced students and those from the most successful families were most likely to attend college in the first place. This error, combined with sneers at trade school graduates has led to this mess. One can hardly blame the colleges for their willingness to cater to whomever is willing to pay to attend.
Some high schools don’t offer trig, especially rural ones, so calculus really shouldn’t be the lowest math class offered; but by God students should know basic algebra going into college
Being a Brit, when I read the word 'kids' I always assume we are talking about 7-year-olds. When the word refers to college students who must be 18-years-old at least i.e. people who typically have already had a couple of sexual partners, smoked dope and passed their driving license, the word 'kid' sounds not quite right, like describing a komodo dragon as 'a pet'.
I have mixed feelings about this usage myself, but my stance is that if 20 years olds insist on being infantilized to this degree I'm not going to stand in their way.
Maybe we should start calling them 'toddlers' and see if they embrace it or are outraged. If the former, we are in real trouble. If the latter, it might prompt them to shape up.
On a related note, I notice that when young people commit crimes they are often referred to as children yet when the question of lowering the voting age comes around the word children mysteriously disappears.
Curious, isn't it.
If we're going to let physical adults be mental and emotional toddlers, then they should have the voting rights of toddlers.
Great point.
University degrees stopped meaning anything a long time ago.
There is much ruin in a credential.
University degrees meant something when they were scarce.
Well, when liberals couldn't bring the bottom up, rig the numbers, dumb the classes down enough, they decided to take the top performers down to create the "equality" they want. When smart kids escaped to AP classes they put the incapable disruptive kids in thise classes too. So, everyone is dumber, even the kids teachers in school are dumber than ever and only enforce rules upon the white and asian kids, letting the others disrupt and cheat.
Liberals are at fault bc it's what they wanted to create in their sick minds.
There’s a couple of things at play. I saw firsthand the significant decline in writing skills when I was a professor at a major university just before and during the pandemic. With language arts you can perhaps explain issues away by hand waving at personal tastes and preferences (although I would argue punctuation, spelling, and using verbs in sentences isn’t subjective). There was always an indication that standards were slipping.
I suspect this issue reflects another cause, pushing students through regardless of performance. With family and friends I’ve seen how being held back a grade due to poor performance is now a parental choice, and most times teachers won’t even offer it. Where one would see the educational disruption of COVID as making it easier to hold back a student who is understandably delayed the opposite is the case.
Resetting the relationship between teacher and parent regarding making assessments and decisions regarding student performance will be a necessary first step in solving this, but that is only a start.
The highlighted examples are very instructive, because they show a large decline in success rate for "word problems" vs straightforward "textbook problems". This suggests that the primary failure of these students is understanding and applying the rote mathematics.
It has long been suggested that "word problems" are "racist" because people with poor English skills might fail them due to comprehension errors, not genuine "math errors". I'm not inclined to be terribly generous here; if you can't comprehend real-world applications, then any "math" skills are functionally useless.
The MPO solution feels like rearranging deck chairs when the core issue is removing objective measurment altogether. That 0.19 GPA spread between calculus-ready and basic algebra deficiency shows why holistic review without standardized tests creates unpredictable outcomes. Universities can prioritize access or maintain rigorous standars, but pretending you can do both without tradeoffs is how you end up teaching fractions to freshmen.
Interestingly enough, the report mentions how the math placement process does take SAT scores into account, so they do understand the utility of standardized testing, but only after admissions apparently.
> they can’t be in college without radically changing what college is, what it’s for
They are and they did (not this batch in particular)
It's amazing how many people with PhDs in math-intensive subjects will insist that gatekeeping is some kind of sin. Equality of opportunity is a nonsensical ideal once you realize that people can't all take advantage of the same ones.
Shoutout to the ~6 kids whose ability to do math stops when you get to double digits, as well (Question 4)
Zat is all parght of zee plan!
Muhahahaha…
Seems to me that the real problem is not university acceptance criteria, but the failure of all the previous schools to teach these skills. Even someone with a predicted genetic IQ of 80 is perfectly capable of learning how to do basic arithmetic if given competent education. *Nobody* should be getting out of high school in such a state. I can't fault the universities too much for taking pity on students who have been failed so utterly and trying to give them what they need.
These kids graduated top of their class too. The UC system is mandated to take the top 10% or so of California graduates. This is not an IQ issue. This is an indictment of California’s primary and secondary school systems.
(Of course it's antisocial to help them at the cost of smarter kids who could contribute more to society, but it's no more antisocial than e.g. giving money to a homeless person rather than donating it to effective charity, or any number of other things that are totally normal in our culture.)
The money providers determine everything.
Federal, state, and corporate money controls the agendas in these schools. The staff works to keep the obligations that were imposed and will be needed to get more money.
When they're told X number of Y students will be graduating, in honors or high GPA, they get to work on making it so in every kind of way.
The good people and teachers leave if they can or stay and become demoralized.
The state and feds pick up those kids delivered from the high schools and drop them into the next institutions to deal with where money and pressure repeats.
It's a sickness.
Imagine there's a new emloyee working on a safety system at your local nuclear power plant. They clearly don't feel right or fit because instead of the path we all followed to get to that point they recieved a lot of "help" but you can't say or do anything because you will face consequences for your problem with it. You ask them, What is this we're working on? They don't know. What are we fixing and doing to this system to make it work? They don't know. How does this system work? They don't know and worse, they have a look and attitude of not caring about your stupid questions even though they're being paid the same as you. This creates a shock and resentment that you will eat. Luckily, there's enough people still around who do know the answers to those questions, and get the system fixed and working properly, but we're getting older. This is the future? Terrifying. Which nuclear plant is this? Won't say. But it's more than just a few and the trend is not good. It feels intentional.