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During the covid panic, and looking for any good excuse to DIE (Diversity Inclusion Equity), the University of California system dissauded applicants from submitting SAT and ACT scores (I’ll just say SAT below).
The SAT had been previously used as a highly weighted criterion for matriculation into the system. Yet the test was “biased”, the ladies in charge claimed, by which word they meant blacks on average scored poorly. There were not enough “black bodies” (their term) on campus to meet their satisfaction.
The ladies in charge thus needed to find a way to acquire more of these “black bodies” to sate their obvious fetish. Somebody suggested dropping the test requirement. Which is to say, to lower the standards. While, of course, denying the standards were being lowered, which is part of the standard Diversity Litany (discussed in the upcoming Son of Everything You Believe Is Wrong.)
Voilà! It worked!
After standards were lowered, there were as was hoped lots more “black bodies” roaming the quad. With the added bonus of many new “brown bodies”, too, as a sort of matching set. You will notice they never say anything about black or brown “minds.”
Then the inevitable happened.
It turned out many students allowed in because of their race didn’t know how to add two numbers together. Multiplying was out of the question. STEM professors who asked this cadre for solutions to simple algebraic equations, such as “10 -2(4-6x) = 0”, had to retire to sanitariums to calm their nerves.
I didn’t make up that equation; the UC gave it to students in 2023. Only 18% got it right.
It wasn’t long after the DIE hit that professors were forced to funnel students into remedial math courses. One imagines they began with the new course Finger Awareness 001: “Next week we’ll add toes and be able to count up to a number mathematicians call twenty.” Pity the poor kids who have been involved in shootouts and were missing digits.
Isn’t inability to calculate a small price to pay to ensure there are sufficient numbers of “black bodies” to please the ladies in charge? After all, how important is mathematics, really. We already know it a brutal form of epistemic violence. And anyway, isn’t the real point of college to supply a pool of students for the lady administrstors to ogle and mother?
Not so, said over 2^3 x 3 x 5^3 (an equation to flummox DIE fans) professors in the UC system. The mathematicians wrote a letter begging for the return of standards. This was signed by a crew which includes a goodly number of STEM and, if you can believe it, “social sciences, humanities, and professional faculty”. The letter can be found here.
With my emphasis:
The UC San Diego Senate–Administration Workgroup on Admissions report documents this crisis in stark terms: in the last five years, the number of students whose mathematics skills fall below high school level increased nearly thirtyfold; moreover, 70% of those students fall below middle school levels, reaching roughly one in twelve members of the entering cohort…
…We now observe preparation gaps so severe that instructors must reteach middle-school mathematics while simultaneously teaching the material students need for sciences, engineering, economics, and other quantitatively demanding fields…
Furthermore, the widening spread between underprepared and well-prepared students creates polarized courses, weakening the foundation available to many students and making it harder to teach at the level required for advanced STEM work.
That last plaint was, as you know, the obvious standard frequent loud argument against Affirmative Action, an argument which was ignored, then disregarded, then paid no heed to. It was never rebutted. Because, as you also know through vivid experience, there is no rebuttal. Except: “We must DIE!”
The faculty know their enemy. The discussion over this next sentence in their letter must have been nerve wracking: “The SAT/ACT mathematics requirement is not an obstacle to equity; rather, it is a prerequisite for it.”
Well, and what choice did they have but to swear fealty to the great god Equality? Without that sentence, the letter would be dismissed as “racist” or something equally idiotic.
The good news was that the letter was seen, as reported on in no less than what appears to be a sympathetic New York Times. That paper (I was astonished to see) included this picture to show the efficacy of the SAT:
The paper recounted how a committee of UC profs (all campuses) recommended re-requiring testing for admission, and that the profs wrote a grand report proving it works. NYT said, “The university’s leaders disregarded the report.”
There have obviously been several recent worrisome education trends, including smartphone distraction, artificial intelligence cheating and Covid school closures. Yet the declines in preparedness among University of California students are larger than the regression elsewhere, which underscores the role of the test-blind policy. California’s top public universities have essentially randomized aspects of the admissions process, admitting unprepared students while rejecting many who could thrive there.
About the letter the professors signed:
So far, the university’s leaders are ignoring the faculty’s plea for urgency. They instead plan to appoint a new committee to study the issue over the next year, saying they need more time to understand the data.
Guess—go on, guess—what the report will say.
The NYT pays obeisance to Equality: “The gaps in test scores accurately describe unacceptable inequities in American society.” I can accept them. They cannot. Their real objection to the “random” system is that (get this), “The University of California is now rejecting students who would excel there, including low-income and minority students, and accepting growing numbers of students who flail.”
In other words, some high-scoring blacks were being passed over because their scores couldn’t count. You have to laugh.
When the university’s regents adopted the test-blind policy in 2020, some understood that they were choosing not to follow the science. On social media recently, Jelani Nelson, a former chair of electrical engineering and computer sciences at Berkeley, published video clips from the decisive 2020 meeting, at which several regents said they were uncomfortable rejecting the evidence. “I am a believer in data and science,” one said. Another said: “Facts matter. And data does matter.” Ultimately, though, they deferred to their colleagues who wanted to ignore test results. As Professor Nelson wrote, “They succumbed to the fad of the moment.”
Not of the moment, my dear lady. Not of the moment.
Video
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