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George Carlin in 2005:
"We’re going to lower the passing grades... so more kids can pass, the school looks good, everybody's happy, the IQ of the country slips another two or three points, and pretty soon all you'll need to get into college is a fuckin’ pencil. Got a pencil? Get the fuck in there, it's physics."
George Carlin would have probably suffered a heart attack (from seeing how stupid his country could actually become) or assassination (by the anger of the dumb people he pointed out) if he were alive now ...
'Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.'
'Governments don't want a population capable of critical thinking, they want obedient workers, people just smart enough to run the machines and just dumb enough to passively accept their situation.'
For anyone reading this .... go listen, watch, or read anything by George Carlin .. if you want to learn, appreciate, understand or have any kind of critical point of view of the world and especially America .. go listen to George Carlin.
They call it the American Dream because you’d have to be asleep to believe it.
Not a murican, but I sure love Carlin so I can only second you strongly.
And yeah he would have probably jumped off a tower already, because too much is too much.
That's the problem if run around with open eyes and an open mind in a broken world: it's hard to not grow cynical.
Critics call the SAT inequitable and say high school grades are a good predictor of college success.
High school grades aren't standardized, and standardized tests are, and they're intaking students from different high schools.
Maybe you could do something with high school grades to try to get comparable results across schools, but then you'd have to try to build some sort of predictive model to compensate for grade inflation at different schools, not to mention the added complication of people taking different classes.
You’d need federal level curriculum and strict teacher training and guidance
"In November, a UC San Diego Academic Senate work group report said it documented a roughly thirty-fold increase between 2020 and 2025 in incoming first-year students whose math skills tested below high school level. The report said 70% of those students fell below middle school levels."
I am going to copy my response to this quote, word-for-word from Reddit, to here. Just to check if I would get a different reaction, or that I'm in the wrong here.
I wonder if the reactions to this quote itself qualify as an indicator for the overall lack of critical thinking skills.
The quoted line fails to address what the baseline for the 30% increase is. Which fails to provide a frame of reference as to what percentage of overall admissions are failing basic math then and now. The 30% could be applied to 0.5% of total admissions, or it could apply to 65% of total admissions. The article itself does not say. Likewise, the 70% number is also compounding on top of the 30%, which makes it meaningless. The increase here could very easily fall within the margin of error.
Given the number of numerical examples given in the article, it is unlikely these statistics were chosen while more convincing data exists, which calls into question what the author's motivation is here.
That being said, this is not an attempt to reject the problem presented in the article. We are seeing homework grades skyrocketing while in-class exam grades cratering year-over-year for the last 3 academic years, most likely to be caused by improved problem solving LLMs and a lack of knowledge retention by the students. Fundamentally, we do not have any better metric to determine student success that is not spoofed by AI, especially for the case of theory-heavy courses. In-class responses of upper-division courses also indicate less people interacting with the course content, which either be tied to disinterest or less critical thinking in class.
As for returning to Standardized Testing. I think this is a "damned if you don't, damned if you do" decision. While standardized testing can act as an indicator for critical thinking, it can also quickly turn into a memorization contest where whoever has the best prep courses wins all. In the latter case, given the costs associated with testing and test prep, it is obvious who this benefits. In addition to this, standardized testing disadvantages students that are neurodivergent or have learning disabilities, where the test taking environment itself affects students grades regardless of how much prep is done.
30 fold means 30x not 30%, but I agree the article could use some more raw numbers.
That said, I don't think it's in doubt that our education system is fucking up. The current gen of college students, my son included, got their high school experience seriously fucked by Covid and now LLMs are basically devaluing having skills at all. I feel bad for kids these days, their prospects are so much worse than basically any previous gen, even with degrees.
Looks like I misread that part while on the bus. Makes sense then and the statistics are more significant (and aligns with my personal experience), but I personally would still like to see the numbers in context.
I agree with you and the other commentor here, just want to add that a lot of reporting stays away from hard numbers because it's hard for both the reporter and most readers to grasp.
Our critical thinking and mathematical issues in education definitely go back beyond the lead paint days, and a lot of journalists will try to smooth out the numbers.
As you say, it's also sometimes done for sensationalism, but this one reads more like the journalist either never got the hard numbers or didn't think the audience would follow along with them.
The timing of this probably didn't do them any favors, doing away with standardized tests right before the effects of COVID-era "learning" (and then LLMs) began to take hold.
Does it really matter? What matters is a student going in debt for it and ultimately ending up in servitude. I doubt anyone cares if he knows his math.