UC STEM professors urge a return to standardized testing, warning that AI-assisted essays and grade inflation hide math gaps

Bring back the SAT at the UC system

(yes that's correct, they don't even look at SATs anymore for college admissions there)

Dostoevsky wrote about this

@johnloeber It also shows that the real value of elite higher education was selecting best students, not providing the best education. When they stopped selecting best students, they stopped producing best graduates.

I have a couple kids in high school 1) They dropped the SAT for political (religious) reasons. When it comes back they will squeeze the essays until they get the desired outcome. 2) Kids with professionally written essays beat great kids who wrote their own. Every. Damn. Time. The signal is not just gone, its backwards. 3) Everything is gamed, including intended major and activities. 4) With so much on the line, HS teachers, counselors, and administrators have been corrupted. Everything is for sale.

@johnloeber Wouldn’t even be an issue if professors were allowed to flunk students, but every proxy for aptitude has been corrupted in the name of “equity”.

@johnloeber I think you’ve nailed like 90% of it here, but there’s also a small cohort destroying standards across the whole system out of a sheer hatred of elitism / inequality / gaps. They simply can’t stand that some people will always have more natural ability than others

@johnloeber AP probably remains among the best predictors of success, although that is probably weakening also. Testing is about to have its renaissance

@johnloeber " Application essays? A whole industry of ghostwriters and now AI has winnowed the signal to zero "

EXACTLY !

Un proctored essay has become useless

@johnloeber "A pointless waste." No. Test abolition had a clear political point & provided benefits for groups within UC system, public officials, and students who otherwise would not have been admitted. For them weaker signal is ok cost of social justice.

UC has no affirmative action. SAT scores are not submitted. It would be interesting if we could get SAT math scores for the 20 to 30% who are doing miserably on the pre-calculus test at Cal. I haven’t see them cited. But say they didn’t take the SAT. It could be because of poor high school instruction. I’d like to see math scores for high school teachers K-12.

@johnloeber And here’s what you’re leaving out. The kids that are smart going there blowing away their peers did submit their scores voluntarily. Two of my kid’s classmates are off to Berkeley.

@johnloeber Wokeness, though at least in part motivated by admirable goals, was an extreme ideological movement that took actions that were divorced from evidence, reason, sound tradition, and common sense. You can’t do that without paying a terrible price. And now the price is being paid.

You mistake the motive for dropping the SATs. It was not pressure from ambitious parents, it was to enable the UC system to use subjective criteria to achieve the demographics they want. The lack of an objective measure gave them plausible deniability discrimination against Asians and Whites

@johnloeber https://www.foxnews.com/media/uc-san-diego-report-finds-alarming-drop-freshmen-math-skills-one-eight-below-middle-school-level

@johnloeber "organizations are usually much more self-preserving"

Progressives are not. They are too short-sighted and narrow-minded to understand why institutions work. They are magical thinkers who think good results just happen spontaneously with no attention to enabling principles.

@johnloeber like i mentioned yesterday, The real danger is those students failling stem courses do graduate and occupy important positions in school boards and so on, making decisions for your kids

@johnloeber John, everyone has gotten dumber. It's not just public university students.

@johnloeber Was just a bunch of chicks who wanted to virtue signal.

Lesson of life is, chicks can’t be in these leadership roles. They need guidance. Once they get the reigns they steer everything of life cliff.

Many of us who taught these tests when all these changes started happening felt very similarly to what you've said in your post here. But it was really tough to convince people that we weren't just saying that because we got paid to teach these tests. People assume that biases automatically discredit.