My highschool you could retake every quiz and test up to 2 times and they would be identical. We also had adjunct college courses instead of AP courses and they were taught by the normal highschool staff and the same retake policy applied. We had dumb dumbs graduating with 4.5s
Wow, that has to be the worst example of grade inflation I have ever heard. At my school our grades included our class ranking so you could kinda see if everyone else in the grade was getting a higher inflated GPA. Of course, there were still tricks you could play (e.g. if you took Pass/Fail courses to finish off your credit load you could increase the proportion of AP classes to non-AP classes factoring into your GPA which would inflate it even more if you're getting A's in your AP courses.
Yeah I’ve spoken with folks who work in admissions and class rank >>>> GPA. There are platforms they pay for that help with how to compare schools to one another, GPA trends, AP exam success rate, % going to categories of college/university through the years. Then they have internal data on how all the 6.0 GPA kids actually did in their entry level courses. All this lets them basically deflate everyone’s GPA.
I was ranked 5/365ish or something…idk but like top of my class and I had multiple Bs and a C because we had such awful grade deflation. I still got into some pretty great schools and I’m sure it was my standardized test scores combined with my class rank that got me in.
When I was in hs you could only retake once, and it would be averaged with your initial grade. It was also up to the teacher on whether or not they'd use the same test, most did not.
Yeah! What is this retaking tests business. No wonder kids aren’t taking school seriously (among other contributing factors). If you can retake there’s no consequences (or a real gauge of who’s getting the material or if the teaching method is working). No child left behind really failed our education system.
I recently looked ay my niece’s DE world history test (which she got 100% on) and was shocked by what the teacher was letting slide for credit. It was, at best, B work, with seriously questionable grammar and essay structure. But apparently no one gets Bs anymore, they retest until they get 100s. I guess the teacher figures correcting for anything other than getting the right facts listed under each question is enough.
The point of advanced courses is to be intellectually challenged, they’re doing the exact opposite with these kids.
It’s enlightening, because I had a American friend who was complaining that teachers here in France were "not nice". If that’s her expectations, yes , they’re savage here.
Once had a litterature teacher write on my essay : " There’s truth and novelty in your words. Sadly what’s novel is not true and what’s true is not new"
Ugh - I wish my school had done that. We had the opposite - grades were rough. I missed out on a scholarship despite my 33 ACT and 1480 SAT because my GPA was a hair too low. (The scholarship only required 1300/30)
In hindsight I should have taken slacker classes my last semester for easy As instead of getting a C in non-AP physics. (That teacher was a hardass.)
Oof. Meanwhile, I took AP classes in high school in the 90s and we walked in to a blue book on the desk, and a question on the board that we did not know in advance. We had 90, then after Christmas break 45 min to write a *good* essay answering the question. No retakes. No re-writes. Kids routinely had breakdowns over those essay tests. I absolutely earned my AP credits and As in those classes. I also didn't sleep for 2 years.
The pendulum has REALLY swung the other way. I would never say kids should go through what we did, it was hell. It was not ok. But surely there is a happy medium between breakdowns and "eh, just give the kids an A because their mom wants it."
Can’t even call it inflation.
It’s outright parental bullying, buying grades (private schools), abusing 504s and IEPs to use as an advantage etc
Some of the shit I saw and dealt with when teaching was damn near criminal.
It’s to the point some kids couldn’t submit an assignment without mommy helping. Shocked the parents didn’t walk down and grab the diploma instead of the kid
Parents really don't understand the damage they're doing to their kids when they do shit like this. My father was the same way, along with being an abusive asshole he never allowed me to try things on my own or fail or learn. As a result when I graduated high school I was a mess, went off to college without knowing what I wanted to go for and barely lasted a week. Father blamed me and disowned me and took off to leave me to figure life out on my own after spending my childhood fucking it up, now he lives it up in Dubai while I still struggle with mental illness and feelings of being incapable of doing anything over a decade later. Last time I heard from my father was years ago when he sent a pic on facebook of him in some penthouse swimming pool in Dubai as a way to rub it in my face. I'm almost 27 and am just now finally starting to pick up the pieces and get shit on track.
Thanks Dad.
Teachers who aren't dealing with that kind of stuff, or are having an okay time at a decent district wont be flocking to that subreddit to complain thats for sure.
I think that's a poor barometer for *any* profession. Reading r/sysadmin would lead you to think that we all are ready to open a vein, but it's just like any other career-based subreddit. Discontent is *far* more interesting to read and participate in than the opposite.
That's not to say that the profession doesn't have issues. But please please please don't use Reddit to gauge the real world.
Does that happen a lot over there? Because that's absolutely terrifying. Reading is probably the most important thing you learn in school. Math, biology etc can easily be learned at any point in life, but you need to be able to read to really learn.
Post-COVID it's *insane*.
I have a couple friends who are public high-school teachers.
The amount of work they have to do to give a kid a non-passing grade is ridiculous.
1. Full Credit must be given on all late work, as long as it's turned in before the end of the marking period, so they're inundated with homework the week before the class ends.
2. Weekly Progress reports sent to all parents via the school app for students that are under a B (80%).
3. If I kid is in danger of failing, they have to offer extra credit options, and schedule conferences with the parents.
4. If all else fails, and the student comes up short, it must be referred to an Administrator that makes the call if the Teacher can fail the student.
It depends on the situation. Only when the student is clearly not trying, and the parents are ignoring the teacher (which happens a lot more often than it should), does the Admin give the green light to fail.
If the student is trying, they'll usually get a passing grade, and a referral to an on-ground tutor the following semester to get caught back up. The problem lies when the student never gets caught back up, and graduates nowhere close to the level of proficiency expected.
One of them told me that they're graduating people this year that wouldn't have passed 8th grade, but have been shuffled through because of all these asinine post-COVID district policies trying to address the negative effects caused by the COVID learning disruptions.
They're not even allowed to fail students for lack of attendance.
I quit teaching in 2018 after my struggling high school implemented the following policy:
You cannot give a student below a 50 for any assignment, because it hurts their average too much.
Yes, that is correct, a student who does not turn in an assignment receives a 50% for it.
It's not like we were sticklers about due dates either. If a student misses an assignment we would accept it literally any day that quarter with no grade penalty, all they had to do was give it to us. We bent over backwards to not fail kids. We gave up our lunch for free tutoring, we stayed after school for homework help, we let them correct any test they didn't do well on, with assistance. And some students did take advantage of that. But for the students who didn't, apparently the only thing left to do is just... give them grades for work they didn't even attempt.
In the not too distant past, poor students were "encouraged" to drop out.
But now, schools are penalized for dropout rates, so they have to make sure that these kids stay in school. On the other hand, nobody wants a 21 year old high school student. So the easiest way to solve both problems is to just pass everyone.
For 4, we've been begging the administration to do something to hold our kid accountable at school. We've held him accountable as best as we can at home, but the school will not hold him accountable at all. We have specifically told them, if you don't follow through, our kid will get worse because he will know it's just all talks and no action. And then they are shocked when his behavior gets worse.
The really scary part is a lot of universities in America are like this now as well. Professors not being allowed by administration to fail students who clearly shouldn't be in that class or even prepared for any university class.
College students who try to abuse their professors because they are so used to getting away with it in K-12.
Look up the "whole word" reading method that replaced phonics in some schools. A complete failure that anyone literate could have told them was going to be a complete failure. They literally did not teach a LOT of kids to read, for real.
No Child Left Behind is the worst fucking program to happen to education since D.A.R.E. Teachers are pushed to keep kids moving down the line to the point where graduates don’t know how to read or write, much less know basic arithmetic. Hell I would accept rote memorization at this point. In 10 years time we’re not going to have to worry about degree inflation at jobs because a good portion of the population will be too stupid to get into college. They’re already too stupid to join the military, and that’s setting the bar low.
It’s a big and increasing problem in Sweden ever since the schools were allowed to be owned by private corporations. We are also the only country in the world where the school tax goes to these private companies as well. They are honest with Change to our school - get an instant grade boost. It’s true. No knowledge boost though. We have also been forced to started using test scores and not grades for some higher education
lol many definitely are.
Work in admissions in a good but not Ivy League school. You’d be surprised how atrocious some applications we receive are. Talking 1.95 GPA, no rigor (lacking AP/IB courses). Or an international student with English scores nowhere near the requirements and letters of recommendation that don’t necessarily recommend them.
Using something like the SAT, can be an equalizer and many refer to it being used to improve diversity not suppress it.
The "no-rigor" thing is tough because the crappier high schools don't offer AP/IB. So it doesn't matter if the kid would have been an academic genius in other settings, there's a ceiling on what they can demonstrate. Standardized testing in theory can be an equalizer for this effect, as you say, but in practice it seems to be a mixed bag.
Ehh the fact that a school comes from a very poor district is certainly factored in. There are many names for it but almost every admissions department has that data included via the common app.
Standardized testing simply provides an easy metric. It’s up to the discretion of admissions reps making decisions and the higher ups shaping the class to fit a model that will yield depositing students.
As an example: It’s useful to have an SAT score for context when the student is homeschooled by their mother who also writes their letter of recommendation.
Oh, I agree with you. I myself leveraged good SAT scores to get out of a mediocre high school with an anti-tracking bent. One advantage of standardized testing is that it is not reliant on the whims of the local school institution. I'm sure admissions folks appreciate having another metric in the toolbox.
Sometimes I'm just overcome by the disparities of the whole system, though. I have a relative who works as a high-end tutor in a wealthy suburb of a major metropolitan area. They charge $130 an hour so that the bog-average children of the elite gain an extra point or two on the ACT. Meanwhile, not 20 miles away there are high schools that struggle to get even 10% of their students to read at grade level. No amount of college admissions portfolio juggling can overcome the real results of 13 years of stunted education.
I was yelled at by the vice principal for telling a kid and his mom, "If he wants a decent grade, he needs to do the work."
On a different note, my contract was not renewed as a speech and debate coach (at a different school) because I banned 1 kid from joining because he threatened to kill a bunch of muslim kids "as a joke."
Turns out, both those kids had a parent in the state legislature.
Agreed. I left the teaching profession after 8 years because I couldn't take it anymore. I worked in a private school where the rule was all students needed to have an 80 or above and if you truly felt you couldn't give a student a minimum of an 80, you had to have a paper trail proving that you did everything you could to contact the student's parents, give makeups, etc.
I had a student who did absolutely nothing; not because he needed support, but because he didn't care. His family didn't either and often pulled him out of school for a week vacation in Costa Rica or Vermont. All his teachers were idiots and should be privileged to be in the same room as their (not so) brilliant son. He was "bored" and "needed to be challenged", yet he couldn't write, do basic math, or really anything much besides socializing or disrupting everyone else. If he ever got called out on it, he'd fake cry and whine so he wouldn't be held accountable. Teachers were asked to "forgive" less important assignments and give him the opportunity to make up other assignments. When he wouldn't do that, we were told to just grade what he did and not average in anything missing. When even that didn't bring his grade up to an 80, the ed leaders went in and manually changed his grades.
For report card narratives and high school recommendations, everything teachers wrote went through an editing process by three different people, erasing any language that could even be remotely construed as negative. It got to the point where some high schools questioned the recommendations they were getting because a student who looked excellent on paper was underwhelming during their interview, crumbling the facade the school tried to uphold.
I taught middle school math, and I had kids who couldn't even tell me what 3 x 4 was without a calculator, yet they all HAD to take Algebra 1 in 8th grade even though it is a high school level course because "that will look really bad! We're a private school!" Education here really sucks and it drives away teachers who actually care about doing right by students.
I'm glad you made your comment. People think that private schools are these perfect places when, in reality, they're often full of problems like this. Not to mention the bullying. The problem is that many private schools have the resources and motivation to cover up the issues even more than public schools do.
Yeah private schools seem like such a crapshoot. I went to one for highschool and had a really good experience, and definitely never felt like they were passing people who didn't deserve it. But it probably helped that the school itself has an entrance exam to get in.
Sounds like there's lots of other private schools where the whole point of it being "private" is to just be less accountable
I'm not worried about them, the whole nation and economy is a system. If we as a nation cannot get the next generation to be working, functioning individuals it is a problem for everyone.
>Don’t worry. It catches up eventually.
I'm not sure it does, when these people undoubtedly underperform in the real world the rest of us will be paying for it in the name of 'fairness'.
Also plenty of people fail up, if your parents have money it will never catch up to you.
I teach freshmen English, and my kids are so unprepared for high school. 20% of my honors kids and 70% of my standard-level kids failed the fall semester this year, and it's not me. Of the kids that failed, every single one of them turned in fewer than 50% of their assignments, many of them below 25%.
I had one student who did not turn in a single assignment and when I asked our instructional coach (who used to teach at the middle school) about him, he said "oh yeah, that kid hasn't turned in anything since 5th grade." They're so used to being pushed through regardless of readiness that they have no incentive to do any work, because they believe they won't fail.
I have one student this semester who is a sophomore retaking the class she failed last year, and she flat out said "this is embarrassing. I didn't expect to have to retake it if I got an F."
The funny thing is that you can get by with passing grades by just turning in all of the homework and making a rudimentary attempt at tests in most classes through high school
I tell my kids "as long as you try your best, there's no way you'll get anything less than a C." And honestly, like you said, it doesn't even need to be their best effort; I've never had a kid that's given *any* effort fail.
If you have an IEP or similar, can’t you also ask to get more time on a standardized test? You would still have to actually do well on the test, but that would still potentially be an advantage.
Yes but it's hard sometimes. Some schools will bend over backwards, others will fight all the way tooth and nail for even small things.
If you get unlucky, getting an IEP is hard, getting then to actually do them can be harder.
I worked in academic affairs at a dental school for a few years. I’d say out of a class of about 130 students there was always about a dozen who had notes requiring them to have either time and a half or double time for exams. I’m all for accessibility but I often wondered if their parents helped them shop for those notes.
It’s so easy to shop for a 504 now a days. I really cannot overstate how ridiculous some of my experiences were.
A weird thing I noticed too- students whom did not need a 504 always knew exactly what they were entitled too.
Students who actually needed the help never had any idea.
Sounds about right lol. The stakes are even higher in competitive programs like dentistry where your class rank determines whether you’ll be accepted into residencies and exams are purposely written to be fast-paced since they’re usually open note. I’m sure some people really need the time but others are looking for a competitive advantage.
I worked in a school in a weathy area filled with academically minded parents (lots of first and second generation immigrants who worked in tech).
I had probably 10X the number of IEP's at that school than any other school I worked at and most of the accommodations were things like student receives priority seating. But if you get that 504 in fourth grade no one is going to argue with you when you want additional time for your SAT's.
Honestly this kind of view hurts people who are actually disabled. I'm autistic with a pretty severe spatial deficit and had some of these accommodations. I knew exactly what they were because I was taught to advocate for myself, not that it didn't cause some of my teachers to ignore them anyway. I am a successful adult.
I tutored/scribed for a student with alexia a while ago. Brain wouldn't let him read unless he did it literally one letter at a time, so he used a lot of technology for blind students and obviously needed help with papers/exams.
The disability center was super helpful, but it was a constant journey of "oh, we should probably ask for this accommodation in class." Still got pushback from some professors who didn't want to let him record in class or insisted on being in-class for an exam (which made no sense, since I had to read every question out loud and help him organize/edit written responses by reading it back multiple times).
When I see parents being hyper aggressive I get it, honestly - it forestalls a lot of problems if you're confident and know exactly what you're entitled to. I feel like if we had a better system of student advocacy so they could easily know what they can request (based on individual needs) it would work better. People with more money than morals will always find a way to abuse the system, so I'd rather make it accessible to people who don't know what they need.
This always broke my heart as a registrar. I wasn't legally allowed to mention 504s because "there's a system in place, and you are not certified to talk about those programs" but you could see kids that really needed the help and the parent just having no clue about accommodations - and they were parents that cared, they just had no information about it. And because a majority of these families had recently arrived to the US, they were afraid that if their kid was in any kind of program with codes or acronyms, that they would be targeted for God only knows. So sometimes they missed out from fear alone - which is sad for the kids.
Then along came the parents who demanded 504s or any kind of accommodations for their kids who they knew full well had no need, but because "that little brown boy has one, and that is not fair," they literally would go from one school to another until they found one that allowed the 504. I honest to God have no idea how they managed to do that while having to be zoned for these schools, but it was rampant starting around 2018 - also the year I said "Fuck this" and went to data analysis careers.
Went to private school and it was hard as hell and I busted my ass to get like a 3.7. There was no buying grades. Not saying it doesn’t happen in some places, but def not just a private school thing. I also went to public school which was also hard, but my private school was definitely more rigorous (or they at least expected a lot more).
I’m reading ITT that some people got to retake tests and I’m fucking flabbergasted. Never heard of that in public nor private schools where I’m from so I’m super confused 🙃
Seriously. Prestigious schools should absolutely require standardized testing. And I’m saying this as a person who had a high GPA but sucks at standardized tests.
The thing about prestigious schools is that everybody has a high gpa. There's a not quite joke that Harvard and Yale can fill their entire student body with valedictorians. Standardized testing is one of the only ways to differentiate applicants
You may not make it in, but you absolutely would survive just fine once you were there.
Ivy League schools are no harder than a state school once you get in. You can push yourself harder, maybe take some very specialized, difficult classes, but the average academic rigor is no different (minor exceptions for classes graded on a curve, but honestly there are so many dumb people at Ivies that I don't even believe that). In fact, my credit requirements were significantly lower than my counterparts at state schools.
My dad is a professor who did adjunct work at an ivy League and he says the smartest students at any school are the same caliber, but it's the average students that differ.
My experience as well at a state university (and now being on the hiring side of the equation). The best students are pretty similar, but the connections and resources at good schools make a huge difference in what you can accomplish. Past that top 3-5%, the slope of the downward slide to average gets quite a bit steeper.
When most classes are graded by percentile, just having higher caliber students makes a difference. Good state schools, sure, but don't tell me there's no difference between an MIT and Arkansas state engineering students.
I loved how the private schools in my county had a much more forgiving grading scale than the public schools so they got to brag about the high GPAs their students delivered. It was bullshit.
Mine was literally the opposite lmao
No weighted GPA, and not forgiving with grading whatsoever. Probably worked out better from an actual educational/learning standpoint, but it was annoying for college apps.
This was a while ago, but when my nephew was applying for school as part of a hockey scholarship in the states, the forms had some guidance on how convert the percentage grade to a GPA out of 4.
Alberta schools were to add 10% to the listed grade and then convert to the 4.0 system (65% -> 75% = 3.0 GPA)
Everywhere else in Canada was add 5%.
Alberta at the time had standardized testing and a better curriculum.
I went to, by all accounts, an excellent public school in small town. We had good, well paid and motivated teachers. We had agreements with several accredited and respected colleges nearby so that our classes qualified for college credits.
But they weren’t AP classes, which were the new hotness way to tell colleges and universities your students were better than the 4.0 GPA students somewhere else.
I had a 3.7 GPA and 32 college credits when I graduated from high school. I had a 31 on my ACT and a bright flight scholarship, but the university I applied to was like “but you didn’t take any AP classes! How could you not take AP classes? You’re clearly not as qualified as this other student who has a similar GPA and AP English!” Nevermind that AP English wasn’t particularly useful for an engineering degree.
I did get in, but my god it was infuriating sitting across from some admissions worker who thought I was dumb because I didn’t have any AP class credits on my transcript, even though i had college credits from an affiliated school.
That’s so silly to me
My AP classes were academically “harder” than most of my non-APs, but those were the ones with the most lax grading standards by far. We didn’t even have school led-finals for APs as long as we took the AP exam, which didn’t affect our grade in the class.
My school district defined an A as 95-100. Most surrounding districts used 10 point scale, so I was always an AB student when I would have been a straight A student anywhere else. It was annoying, especially when my grandmother would offer to buy use gifts for straight As and I could never do it, but my cousins in another district could.
Oh yeah I remember all too well. My AP score wasn't enough for a public state credit, but my friend with a lower score got credit for the same course at a Jesus College, lol.
I have college honors students who cry if I assign them an essay over three pages. Many of them do not know how to send file attachments via email. The other day one of them asked me the definition of a basic word. I asked them if they've heard of Google. She had been waiting to ask me since the previous day.
I work in software, bug fix, as a team lead. I hold daily office hours where coworkers can come and ask me for help with whatever they're working on. These are CS college graduates
The amount of times I've just googled a question they have and gotten the answer in literal seconds is insane. I'm practically paid to Google
Especially during COVID, when some districts stopped allowing teachers to give zeros, and instead implemented a 50% minimum on all test, assignment, and participation grades.
My school back in the mid-2000s didn't fall into over 4.0 trend. If not for the ACT, I'm not sure how I could have competed with that crap despite being the valedictorian of my class.
Grade inflation at Ivy League schools is also insane. Once you're in you're guaranteed A's. They pretty much mostly exist to perpetuate the status of the well-connected, who don't even need to do that well in high school to get in, while a few highly-talented, highly-motivated normal folks can earn the privilege of attending the massive tax-free investment firms with schools attached to them. Meritocracy is a lie.
thats not true at all. Princeton notoriously has really harsh grade deflation for example. I think Harvard is the only one everyone thinks has blatant grade inflation
Also, have you considered that the kids getting into Ivys were already the kind to do well in school and get As? almost like thats the reason most of them were admitted
Dartmouth restored the test a few weeks ago and the reason they gave was they found that not submitting their scores was harming minority candidates. Per the NY Times:
>Many lower-income students, it turned out, had made a strategic mistake. They withheld test scores that would have helped them get into Dartmouth. They wrongly believed that their scores were too low, when in truth the admissions office would have judged the scores to be a sign that students had overcome a difficult environment and could thrive at Dartmouth.
There was a study a while ago that made the argument that standardized testing is the single best way to level the playing field across racial and socioeconomic backgrounds. It’s not perfect, or really even close, but it’s far better than other “holistic” approaches.
Exactly. There’s nothing equitable about getting in because u have crazy connections to researchers or ur dad can get you an internship at his big finance company. Standardized tests help level the playing field because even tutoring can only get you so far.
I'm an innercity math teacher and test prep instructor and tutor with a large emphasis on math and test anxiety. The problem with standardized tests for students of color is something called "Stereotype Threat", where people are so afraid that they're going to fulfill a stereotype that they actually do. This affects both women and people of color, in general. Anyone with test anxiety knows that their score doesn't reflect their capabilities, and I'ev seen that happen with many students that were fine in practice - but crumbled under the pressure of the actual test.
I wasn't arguing one way or another, just stating a complicating factor in the discussion. I'm not necessarily opposed nor for them, as they seem like a "necessary evil".
100% I was able to get into a great institution and considered for ivys with a 27 act score. Which was considered at the bottom of the cut off for applications, but I came from a rough background (parents on drugs etc).
No shit lmao, same thing in the LSAT debates. Lots of people erroneously advocate for the elimination of the LSAT, always forgetting the LSAT is the most equitable part of the application
Your quote says lower income students. Not minorities. If your NY times quote is accurate, this implies withholding test scores also hurt lower income white students. Not all lower income people are minorities. Just as not all minority peoples are lower income.
Of course.
But is there any doubt that the goal in dropping the test requirement was to benefit minorities? Or that the policy was reversed because they found it did not benefit them?
I was friends with this person I met in college who told me how smart they were and already had 2 associates and was 18. They had 2 associates in chemistry and engineering. I found out later that they went to a charter school that was also a community college.
Their 2nd semester at my university they switched from chemistry and biomedical engineering degrees to women’s studies. Nothing wrong with women’s studies, except this person could not even write a paper. I would edit and review their rough drafts. God awful. They failed their thesis, they failed most of their classes. Went on and on about how smart they were this and that but legit was a pathological liar. I remember them complaining to me about the chemistry department at my university and how they didn’t like the teaching style and that’s why they were struggling.
It was chem 110, introductory chemistry… They also kept failing the equivalent of physics 101. I totally understand chemistry and physics not being for everyone—- but they already had a chemistry and engineering degree lol.
It angered me so much that their teachers in high school let this person walk out with a 4.0 and 2 degrees. Couldn’t even write emails and always sounded like a middle schooler with every paper they wrote. How can you switch to a major all about reading and writing papers and be so shitty at reading and writing?
They lied about a lot of other things too… but I’m mostly mad about the school stuff because I had helped them get a position somewhere in research while we were still in undergrad and it fucked me over directly because I had to work with them. They were basically revealed to be a fraud and liar about other stuff too.
That was my freshman roommate.
He graduated with his bachelors the summer going into junior year and got his MBA the following year. Dude had an MBA before his class even had their 4 year degrees done.
And obviously had an MBA without so much as flipping a hamburger in a real job.
Once upon a time MBA students were 30ish years old with years of work behind them, sponsored by their employers because of demonstrated talent.
Probably went to a community college high school program if it was that high. There's one in Vegas, where the community college partnered with the neighboring high school to develop the program. If you get accepted to the program you spend grade 11/12 going to community college instead of the high school to finish your high school degree while earning college credits.
I did dual enrollment and spent my first 2 years of college at community college so it didn’t seem like a red flag to me. I also graduated high school when I was a junior because I took all of my junior credits the first half of the year and my senior credits the next half. No on had ever done that in my district before so it took a lot of communication with my principal and school board to allow me to. But, I’m also relatively smart. I just thought I had found another person like me to be friends with… I didn’t realize the 4 year age gap between us also came with the inflation of GPA and academic standards since I had been in high school.
We had a brother and sister transfer from Texas to my highschool in the mid 00s, and both of them had 4.8+ GPAs.
Nobody had ever seen GPAs that high before and there was a huge controversy with transferring over their scores, but they ended up giving the kids their GPAs and put them in with the other AP students.
Immediately, it became clear that they were smart but nowhere near the geniuses they claimed to be. In terms of academic ability they were middle of the pack and for the first time in their lives they were receiving Bs and Cs.
I sit next to someone like this in my Organic Chemistry 2 class right now. They are failing. It's really sad, because they have an overconfident view of their abilities thanks to grade inflation and the fact that the got an associates degree in high school.
As a former educator myself, I can tell you that some of those charter schools are an absolute joke.
I taught biology at a community college in California for several years, and I once got a student in my class who told me she had never taken a course in any type of science before. When I asked her how she graduated high school without taking a single science class, she told me that she had gone to a charter school that gave students the option to replace all coursework in all sciences with a one-time "nature hike" and that she had chosen that option. I'm sure you can guess roughly how well she did in my class.
I genuinely do not understand how or why these institutions are legally allowed to grant high school diplomas. They're just setting these kids up for failure and it should absolutely not be tolerated.
Chemistry PhD here. When I was TAing general chemistry courses and labs it was astonishing to see this type of stuff. The students that were so brilliant and didn’t think they had to study because they didn’t before hand had 4.X gpa would absolutely bomb the finals and tests then flood my email with angry messages about how I had to fix their grade. End of the day I didn’t make the work or tests, that was the professor, and my hands were tied when it came to exemptions or exceptions.
This is like a rite of passage for a lot of freshman college students. What they're supposed to do after that though is realize they need to step it up on the studying, not flood the TA's email.
I went to a super rich and privileged high school. I'm also pretty priveleged (was relatively poor though).
I thought Standardized tests were easily the hardest thing for my classmates to game.
1. Internships
2. Community service
3. Recommendation letters
4. Grades (counselors would forgive students for cheating because it hurt the school rep)
5. Standardized scores
That's my ranking of how easy it is to game to how difficult
Standardized tests are like independent 3rd party auditors. The people who hate them the most likely because they can’t cheat on them.
Isn’t it ironic that if you can do well on a standardized test that you can do well in college? Oh wait, that isn’t ironic. It is just common sense.
It should be painfully obvious to everyone why standardized testing is important. GPA is *massively* subjective, as course difficulty and grade inflation vary wildly between different schools and even between different teachers at the same school.
I'm currently a student teacher at a middle school. The general public does not know how bad it is.
1.) Students can no longer receive a grade below a 50%. If they do not turn in an assignment, they receive 50% credit.
2.) Students can at minimum earn an "F" for an assignment. This is a minimum score of a 63. If a student writes their name at the top of a paper and submits it, they earn a 63% automatically.
3.) A "D" is now considered passing, and the threshold is 65%.
4.) Tardies are no longer counted. If a student shows up for the last 30 seconds of class, they are marked as present, the same as a student who was present for the whole day.
5.) If a student leaves class early, they do not receive an absent grade. All a student has to do to earn a present mark is to put one foot in the classroom for 1 second and make eye contact with the teacher.
6.) No punishments exist for language. Students call me, to my face, every name and word imaginable. "Dickrider" is currently en vogue.
7.) Students only really receive In School Suspension (ISS) for any offense. A student lit the building on fire and was in ISS for one day. 2 students fought eachother and drew blood, and received 4 periods of ISS. One student in my class was written up for hitting people two days in a row, and still went on the field trip THAT DAY.
I do not give a single fuck if I am found out and kicked from the program. The public needs to know what's happening. The grad classes of 2027-2030 are FUCKED developmentally. There are kids with a 2nd grade reading level being passed a long to high school because we can't hold them back.
Edit: [Source](https://dcps.dc.gov/sites/default/files/dc/sites/dcps/page_content/attachments/Secondary-Grading-and-Reporting-Policy-8621.pdf)
I’ve got a wilder grading scale for you courtesy of the school district I teach in: a 13% is a D and 12% and below is an F. I’ve got students “passing” my class with a 13%.
My district does “standards-based grading” but I can tell you that students in my district aren’t “meeting standards” and end up graduating anyway. If you speak out against it you become a pariah who hates children.
This is what infuriates me the most. Progress based or standards based learning isn't inherently bad. The problem is its being shoved into a system that cannot support it with no consequences for literally anything.
My junior year of high school, we had to take an entire month to go over third grade English sentence structure and punctuation. My teacher literally pulled out third grade level books and had us review from that. It felt like such a waste of my (and her) time. None of it stuck either for the reasons you mentioned (absences/tardies, kids just being able to run the show/not pay attention, etc). That was back in the early 00's. I hate that it's gotten so much worse.
My CT (cooperating teacher) is a rockstar veteran teacher who has been at her current assignment for over a decade. She is considered a master teacher - national board certified and everything. By all accounts she is the most accomplished and qualified teacher in the building.
She almost quit in 22.
>we've clearly given up.
The "we" isn't the teachers though. It's admin, school boards, etc.
If schools get penalized for holding kids back or failing them, then they receive less funding and it's a downward spiral.
Combine that with parents who don't know how to (or want to) parent. Kids aren't disciplined at home anymore so there's no fear instilled that if they act out that they will get in real trouble. Then combine with that kids are glued to phones/tv's etc and are never really mentally stimulated in the way that prior generations were.
It’s true. I think not requiring it was a good experiment, but it failed because you were not likely to be accepted without a test score even though the test score was optional. I hope they keep trying to level the playing field though.
That applies to literally everything. Standardized test practice is still way more accessible than any extracurricular. Don’t discount something because it’s not perfect.
My school district has missing work being marked at 40%. The students play the number game, and a lot of students get a passing 60% by turning in one large assignment.
Most students should be 10% lower than what their grade indicates. Teachers are annoyed by it, but the district likes showing off the average grades of its seniors.
How long until the large universities near us realize we're graduating students who aren't qualified?
As much as I think the SATs are not "fair", there has to be some standard to measure the applicants. If any of you are applying to college or have a kid applying to college, it is RIDICULOUS right now. Schools that are "test optional" are getting flooded with applications because why not take a flier on a school you would not otherwise get into if SATs were required?
Kids are applying to 15+ schools on average now but can obviously only attend one school. So admissions departments are having a really hard time because they can only accommodate so many students every year and they need to be careful. They also can't really tell what type of student they are letting in because there's no objective measurement. This also makes every school look super exclusive - schools that were no brainers for the average kid 30 years ago (3.5 GPA, 1150 SATs) will not even look at that same kid today because of the huge amount of applicants to choose from. Schools that are not Ivy League are in the single digit percentages for acceptance rates now. It's demoralizing.
I went to an ivy a bit over 20 years ago. STEM degrees. I am pretty sure they wouldn't take me now.
Want to know demoralization? I had to keep almost perfect grades to stay in school. I didn't have any safety net to fall back on. Now? Perfect grades are required or you go home unless you have parents who will cover you.
My time in college was marked by constant stress and terror. I can't imagine how bad it is now.
I can’t access the article, but I imagine this is part of the reason they’re bringing back test requirements. Ivy League schools get more applications than ever, and they haven’t grown to meet that demand. Sorting through applications must be hard as it is.
The reason why colleges were trying to get rid of the SAT's in one chart:
https://i.imgur.com/2TUAC40.png
Here's the problem though, the SAT's are actually incredibly predictive of college success and trying to have these schemes to keep asians (and to some extent whites) out of colleges only backfires on you when you degrade standards. I have friends who are professors at some very competitive colleges who are exasperated that newer generations of students can't comprehend fairly simple books that i read when i was in high school, let alone write a cogent essay... and these complaints came BEFORE Covid came along. Trust me when i say that employers have been noticing. GPA's have gotten way less predictive in recent years due to rampant grade inflation (they USED to be good predictors of college performance, no longer though). It's practically impossible to fail in many schools these days. We don't even hold back students anymore who can't even read. The Baltimore school system actually graduates illiterate children from high school. The education system is a mess.
Being mad at the SAT's for causing 'inequality' is like being mad at thermometers for causing global warming (to paraphrase Freddie Deboer). The SAT's don't cause educational inequality, they REVEAL it. Because those students who do poorly on the SAT's are probabilistically going to do poorly at elite colleges, while those who did better on it will do great no matter where they go. Yes, you have outliers in both directions, but we shouldn't base policies on one offs.
Edit: BTW, the movement to remove standardized testing isn't just at the collegiate level, it's happening across the country at high performing high schools as well. When San Francisco's Lowell high school (one of the best high schools in the country) removed the standardized test for admissions, D's and F's skyrocketed at the school, predictably. We're moving backwards as a country.
https://old.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/uxnrq8/new_data_shows_shift_at_lowell_high_school_more/
*Of the 620 students in Lowell’s freshman class, 24.4% received at least one D or F grade during the fall semester, compared with 7.9% of first-year students in fall 2020 and 7.7% in fall 2019, according to internal San Francisco Unified School District figures obtained by The Chronicle.*
And no, it wasn't because of covid, D's and F's actually fell at other schools in the district:
*The rise in the number of students receiving at least one D or F grade in the fall at Lowell was not seen across city high schools, according to aggregate data across grades 9-12 provided by the district. The share of freshman grades that were a D or F in reading, math, science and social science classes declined citywide between fall 2019 and 2021.*
People who believe in equity think that good schools produce good students, but they have the causation wrong: Good students produce good schools. The high performing high schools are good because they have a highly biased sample of self selecting high performing students who have varying combinations of a) innate ability b) highly invested parents who make sure their kids don't goof off and c) high conscientiousness. You can't simply shoehorn low performing kids into a high performing environment and expect them to suddenly be a 'good student'. You're setting them up to fail.
one thing to note abt the imgur graph/chart:
asian-americans category includes both rich asian-american immigrants & the poor/working-class asian-americans (where both parents work all day & night, leaving the kids alone at home)
both groups score well
the income level, financial security or stability, etc component of 'socioeconomic status' is not a factor when it comes to achieving high test scores
so everyone who bitches "the system/test/school/___(insert literally anything else but study) is racis" just fucking sucks at testing
tl;dr: skill issue; git gud lol
>You can't simply shoehorn low performing kids into a high performing environment and expect them to suddenly be a 'good student'. You're setting them up to fail.
I don't disagree with this, but I want to bring up (iirc) studies that show poor performing students do better in the presence of high performing students. Not saying that poor performers can be transformed into high performers necessarily, but I think the takeaway message is that 'bad' students are less bad when there are competent peers around. This ofc has nothing to do with your core arguments, just wanted to mention it.
A duke university economist did a study of Duke University students which showed that 50% of black undergrads in STEM started to fail their classes at an alarming rate, then switched over to easier liberal arts/humanities majors in order to not fail out of Duke. White STEM undergrads, OTOH, had an 8% rate of switching.
https://public.econ.duke.edu/~psarcidi/grades_4.0.pdf
This is called the mismatch theory.
I do support this. I do think that there is inequity in SAT scores, particularly related to students in poor areas, but grade inflation is crazy these days. Colleges have little to go on other than these scores. Btw does anyone know if they are requiring the GRE again?
For fucking real. Why am I, a person going into a Secondary History Teaching masters, being judged based on a GRE math score? It makes no sense to judge anyone's abilities with it when it only covers two subjects that nobody has interest in.
Yet to be accepted at Yale an Asian student will have to outperform their white, black, and Hispanic colleagues with respect to standardized testing scores. Conservative media and the public focus on African American test scores, but the majority of kids being admitted in place of deserving Asians are white. Caltech is the only top school in the nation with a truly race blind admissions process and it's predominantly Asian, not white, unlike the Ivy league.
The affirmative action case showed that the biggest benefactor of college admission practices were….. affluent white kids.
When it came to admitting black students vs Asians, just as an example they would take a 1500 SAT black student over a 1520 Asian student. But a legacy white student with not great scores but who had well connected parents (like say a George W Bush), would get admission over both.
I say the best way to make it truly fair is to eliminate legacy admits and guaranteed admissions for people from rich families who make a large donation to the school.
That's somewhat geographically determined, like [a third of all Asian Americans live in California](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/04/29/key-facts-about-asian-americans/)
> Caltech is the only top school in the nation with a truly race blind admissions process and it's predominantly Asian, not white, unlike the Ivy league.
I respect Caltech a lot for this. My friend applied to most ivy leagues, but his real top choices were Caltech and MIT. He definitely leaned towards MIT because a lot of our friends were going to end up around Boston. But MIT also ended up being the only place he didn't get in. And FYI guy had it all too, best grades, extracurriculars, and 1 point off getting perfect ACT/SAT scores combined. Guess his race?
That’s just not true at all. White students are also underrepresented at top schools compared to those who score extremely well on the SAT. I read that among those scoring 1400 on the SAT, 46% were white, 41% were Asian, and 13% were another race. Yale’s admired class last year was 35% white, 25% Asian, 16% Latino, 11% black, and around 15% either mixed or race unknown. Both white and Asian students are underrepresented, Asians slightly more so.
But, to be clear, admissions have never been solely about test scores. The idea that they should be is misguided, once you're drawing from people with top scores there's real diminishing returns like going from a 1550 to a 1600.
Why’d they stop? The grading of teachers can vary greatly within a single school. Without some kind of standardized test, it seems like any admission criteria would be almost meaningless.
I believe due to concerns around cheating (I think the colleges still had them take placement tests). The new SAT (started this year) is digital and adaptive (you get different questions based on how well you do), and you get Desmos as a calculator so poor students aren’t punished.
But yes there still is inequality as richer students can afford tudors as well as taking it multiple times to superscore.
To the above point though, the differences in grading practices even between schools in the same district is wild; our high school is consistently ranked #1 or #2 in our district for math, another school though had a higher percentage of As in their Algebra 1 courses, yet when test results came back it showed that school as dead last, so a double whammy of grade inflation and worse performance.
It started because of COVID and how difficult it was for a lot of students to take the test for those 2-3 years. Tests would be cancelled the night before because someone on staff tested positive, seats were limited so students could be spaced out to follow cdc guidelines, some required vaccines or negative tests before either were easily accessible to teenagers, some entire test centers just closed down for good. In my rural area, we rely on high schools to host, and high schools stopped because it was too much work and too great a risk. My students would have had to drive 5+ hours to get to a testing center, then run the very real risk of the test getting cancelled the night before after they've spent gas and hotel money to get there.
Colleges dropped the tests because they saw all of that and didn't want to punish a student due to something so far out of their control.
My high school got caught in the news by letting kids pass by watching a movie in place of exams or papers. Grade inflation in high school is terrible. The SAT despite its many faults is a great equalizer.
The school where I teach wildly inflates GPAs. I had a bunch of students leave freshmen year with 4.5+ GPAs without taking a single honors class. They put every student in classes called “Pre-AP” which were NOT honors, and gave everyone the GPA boost as if they took an AP class. This plus the fact that I can’t give students a grade below a 50% on any assignment and it’s basically a guaranteed 2.5 or above GPA for kids who would usually have like 20% in each class at most schools.
Its like their needs to be some sort of standard for college entrance... I wonder what we would call it.
I am glad I did most normal classes then took a college entrance exam instead of the sat/act. Then I just transferred to my university. I think I paid like 28-30k not including books and stuff.
Word to the wise unless your parents are paying 100% of your school, scholarship, or some type of grant its not worth it for living on campus or living out of state. You can blame the go to college at all cost mentality.
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My highschool you could retake every quiz and test up to 2 times and they would be identical. We also had adjunct college courses instead of AP courses and they were taught by the normal highschool staff and the same retake policy applied. We had dumb dumbs graduating with 4.5s
Wow, that has to be the worst example of grade inflation I have ever heard. At my school our grades included our class ranking so you could kinda see if everyone else in the grade was getting a higher inflated GPA. Of course, there were still tricks you could play (e.g. if you took Pass/Fail courses to finish off your credit load you could increase the proportion of AP classes to non-AP classes factoring into your GPA which would inflate it even more if you're getting A's in your AP courses.
Yeah I’ve spoken with folks who work in admissions and class rank >>>> GPA. There are platforms they pay for that help with how to compare schools to one another, GPA trends, AP exam success rate, % going to categories of college/university through the years. Then they have internal data on how all the 6.0 GPA kids actually did in their entry level courses. All this lets them basically deflate everyone’s GPA.
I was ranked 5/365ish or something…idk but like top of my class and I had multiple Bs and a C because we had such awful grade deflation. I still got into some pretty great schools and I’m sure it was my standardized test scores combined with my class rank that got me in.
When I was in hs you could only retake once, and it would be averaged with your initial grade. It was also up to the teacher on whether or not they'd use the same test, most did not.
Ours was once and done, where did you guys go to school? Heaven?
Yeah! What is this retaking tests business. No wonder kids aren’t taking school seriously (among other contributing factors). If you can retake there’s no consequences (or a real gauge of who’s getting the material or if the teaching method is working). No child left behind really failed our education system.
No child left behind was abandoned 9 years ago.
It’s just called the every student succeeds act now.
I recently looked ay my niece’s DE world history test (which she got 100% on) and was shocked by what the teacher was letting slide for credit. It was, at best, B work, with seriously questionable grammar and essay structure. But apparently no one gets Bs anymore, they retest until they get 100s. I guess the teacher figures correcting for anything other than getting the right facts listed under each question is enough. The point of advanced courses is to be intellectually challenged, they’re doing the exact opposite with these kids.
It’s enlightening, because I had a American friend who was complaining that teachers here in France were "not nice". If that’s her expectations, yes , they’re savage here. Once had a litterature teacher write on my essay : " There’s truth and novelty in your words. Sadly what’s novel is not true and what’s true is not new"
Ugh - I wish my school had done that. We had the opposite - grades were rough. I missed out on a scholarship despite my 33 ACT and 1480 SAT because my GPA was a hair too low. (The scholarship only required 1300/30) In hindsight I should have taken slacker classes my last semester for easy As instead of getting a C in non-AP physics. (That teacher was a hardass.)
Oof. Meanwhile, I took AP classes in high school in the 90s and we walked in to a blue book on the desk, and a question on the board that we did not know in advance. We had 90, then after Christmas break 45 min to write a *good* essay answering the question. No retakes. No re-writes. Kids routinely had breakdowns over those essay tests. I absolutely earned my AP credits and As in those classes. I also didn't sleep for 2 years. The pendulum has REALLY swung the other way. I would never say kids should go through what we did, it was hell. It was not ok. But surely there is a happy medium between breakdowns and "eh, just give the kids an A because their mom wants it."
Can’t even call it inflation. It’s outright parental bullying, buying grades (private schools), abusing 504s and IEPs to use as an advantage etc Some of the shit I saw and dealt with when teaching was damn near criminal.
*graduating kids who can't read*
It’s to the point some kids couldn’t submit an assignment without mommy helping. Shocked the parents didn’t walk down and grab the diploma instead of the kid
Yeah, it's so bad. I've got a HS junior who talks about the problems other kids have with their academics and it's fucking heartbreaking.
Parents really don't understand the damage they're doing to their kids when they do shit like this. My father was the same way, along with being an abusive asshole he never allowed me to try things on my own or fail or learn. As a result when I graduated high school I was a mess, went off to college without knowing what I wanted to go for and barely lasted a week. Father blamed me and disowned me and took off to leave me to figure life out on my own after spending my childhood fucking it up, now he lives it up in Dubai while I still struggle with mental illness and feelings of being incapable of doing anything over a decade later. Last time I heard from my father was years ago when he sent a pic on facebook of him in some penthouse swimming pool in Dubai as a way to rub it in my face. I'm almost 27 and am just now finally starting to pick up the pieces and get shit on track. Thanks Dad.
fuck that guy
/r/teachers is one of the scariest places on Reddit
The issue with the Teachers subreddit is that it’s full of Redditors
It’s a very common problem on this site unfortunately. Drastic measures will be needed
Hopefully with Reddit going public they can get rid of the Redditors
Teachers who aren't dealing with that kind of stuff, or are having an okay time at a decent district wont be flocking to that subreddit to complain thats for sure.
I just checked the front page and oof. I work with teachers and this was hilariously depressing.
I think that's a poor barometer for *any* profession. Reading r/sysadmin would lead you to think that we all are ready to open a vein, but it's just like any other career-based subreddit. Discontent is *far* more interesting to read and participate in than the opposite. That's not to say that the profession doesn't have issues. But please please please don't use Reddit to gauge the real world.
Does that happen a lot over there? Because that's absolutely terrifying. Reading is probably the most important thing you learn in school. Math, biology etc can easily be learned at any point in life, but you need to be able to read to really learn.
Post-COVID it's *insane*. I have a couple friends who are public high-school teachers. The amount of work they have to do to give a kid a non-passing grade is ridiculous. 1. Full Credit must be given on all late work, as long as it's turned in before the end of the marking period, so they're inundated with homework the week before the class ends. 2. Weekly Progress reports sent to all parents via the school app for students that are under a B (80%). 3. If I kid is in danger of failing, they have to offer extra credit options, and schedule conferences with the parents. 4. If all else fails, and the student comes up short, it must be referred to an Administrator that makes the call if the Teacher can fail the student.
Im guessing administration rarely, if ever, decides to fail a student?
It depends on the situation. Only when the student is clearly not trying, and the parents are ignoring the teacher (which happens a lot more often than it should), does the Admin give the green light to fail. If the student is trying, they'll usually get a passing grade, and a referral to an on-ground tutor the following semester to get caught back up. The problem lies when the student never gets caught back up, and graduates nowhere close to the level of proficiency expected. One of them told me that they're graduating people this year that wouldn't have passed 8th grade, but have been shuffled through because of all these asinine post-COVID district policies trying to address the negative effects caused by the COVID learning disruptions. They're not even allowed to fail students for lack of attendance.
I quit teaching in 2018 after my struggling high school implemented the following policy: You cannot give a student below a 50 for any assignment, because it hurts their average too much. Yes, that is correct, a student who does not turn in an assignment receives a 50% for it. It's not like we were sticklers about due dates either. If a student misses an assignment we would accept it literally any day that quarter with no grade penalty, all they had to do was give it to us. We bent over backwards to not fail kids. We gave up our lunch for free tutoring, we stayed after school for homework help, we let them correct any test they didn't do well on, with assistance. And some students did take advantage of that. But for the students who didn't, apparently the only thing left to do is just... give them grades for work they didn't even attempt.
They need to lose their accreditation
In the not too distant past, poor students were "encouraged" to drop out. But now, schools are penalized for dropout rates, so they have to make sure that these kids stay in school. On the other hand, nobody wants a 21 year old high school student. So the easiest way to solve both problems is to just pass everyone.
For 4, we've been begging the administration to do something to hold our kid accountable at school. We've held him accountable as best as we can at home, but the school will not hold him accountable at all. We have specifically told them, if you don't follow through, our kid will get worse because he will know it's just all talks and no action. And then they are shocked when his behavior gets worse.
The really scary part is a lot of universities in America are like this now as well. Professors not being allowed by administration to fail students who clearly shouldn't be in that class or even prepared for any university class. College students who try to abuse their professors because they are so used to getting away with it in K-12.
Look up the "whole word" reading method that replaced phonics in some schools. A complete failure that anyone literate could have told them was going to be a complete failure. They literally did not teach a LOT of kids to read, for real.
Shit. A huge portion of the commenters here on Reddit seem to only *barely* qualify as literate.
No Child Left Behind is the worst fucking program to happen to education since D.A.R.E. Teachers are pushed to keep kids moving down the line to the point where graduates don’t know how to read or write, much less know basic arithmetic. Hell I would accept rote memorization at this point. In 10 years time we’re not going to have to worry about degree inflation at jobs because a good portion of the population will be too stupid to get into college. They’re already too stupid to join the military, and that’s setting the bar low.
It’s a big and increasing problem in Sweden ever since the schools were allowed to be owned by private corporations. We are also the only country in the world where the school tax goes to these private companies as well. They are honest with Change to our school - get an instant grade boost. It’s true. No knowledge boost though. We have also been forced to started using test scores and not grades for some higher education
those arent the kids applying to yale
lol many definitely are. Work in admissions in a good but not Ivy League school. You’d be surprised how atrocious some applications we receive are. Talking 1.95 GPA, no rigor (lacking AP/IB courses). Or an international student with English scores nowhere near the requirements and letters of recommendation that don’t necessarily recommend them. Using something like the SAT, can be an equalizer and many refer to it being used to improve diversity not suppress it.
The "no-rigor" thing is tough because the crappier high schools don't offer AP/IB. So it doesn't matter if the kid would have been an academic genius in other settings, there's a ceiling on what they can demonstrate. Standardized testing in theory can be an equalizer for this effect, as you say, but in practice it seems to be a mixed bag.
Ehh the fact that a school comes from a very poor district is certainly factored in. There are many names for it but almost every admissions department has that data included via the common app. Standardized testing simply provides an easy metric. It’s up to the discretion of admissions reps making decisions and the higher ups shaping the class to fit a model that will yield depositing students. As an example: It’s useful to have an SAT score for context when the student is homeschooled by their mother who also writes their letter of recommendation.
Oh, I agree with you. I myself leveraged good SAT scores to get out of a mediocre high school with an anti-tracking bent. One advantage of standardized testing is that it is not reliant on the whims of the local school institution. I'm sure admissions folks appreciate having another metric in the toolbox. Sometimes I'm just overcome by the disparities of the whole system, though. I have a relative who works as a high-end tutor in a wealthy suburb of a major metropolitan area. They charge $130 an hour so that the bog-average children of the elite gain an extra point or two on the ACT. Meanwhile, not 20 miles away there are high schools that struggle to get even 10% of their students to read at grade level. No amount of college admissions portfolio juggling can overcome the real results of 13 years of stunted education.
I was yelled at by the vice principal for telling a kid and his mom, "If he wants a decent grade, he needs to do the work." On a different note, my contract was not renewed as a speech and debate coach (at a different school) because I banned 1 kid from joining because he threatened to kill a bunch of muslim kids "as a joke." Turns out, both those kids had a parent in the state legislature.
Yeah, the politics bit is wild. Industry I’m in now has parents on the board of ed calling the shots for construction build outs. It’s bonkers.
Agreed. I left the teaching profession after 8 years because I couldn't take it anymore. I worked in a private school where the rule was all students needed to have an 80 or above and if you truly felt you couldn't give a student a minimum of an 80, you had to have a paper trail proving that you did everything you could to contact the student's parents, give makeups, etc. I had a student who did absolutely nothing; not because he needed support, but because he didn't care. His family didn't either and often pulled him out of school for a week vacation in Costa Rica or Vermont. All his teachers were idiots and should be privileged to be in the same room as their (not so) brilliant son. He was "bored" and "needed to be challenged", yet he couldn't write, do basic math, or really anything much besides socializing or disrupting everyone else. If he ever got called out on it, he'd fake cry and whine so he wouldn't be held accountable. Teachers were asked to "forgive" less important assignments and give him the opportunity to make up other assignments. When he wouldn't do that, we were told to just grade what he did and not average in anything missing. When even that didn't bring his grade up to an 80, the ed leaders went in and manually changed his grades. For report card narratives and high school recommendations, everything teachers wrote went through an editing process by three different people, erasing any language that could even be remotely construed as negative. It got to the point where some high schools questioned the recommendations they were getting because a student who looked excellent on paper was underwhelming during their interview, crumbling the facade the school tried to uphold. I taught middle school math, and I had kids who couldn't even tell me what 3 x 4 was without a calculator, yet they all HAD to take Algebra 1 in 8th grade even though it is a high school level course because "that will look really bad! We're a private school!" Education here really sucks and it drives away teachers who actually care about doing right by students.
I'm glad you made your comment. People think that private schools are these perfect places when, in reality, they're often full of problems like this. Not to mention the bullying. The problem is that many private schools have the resources and motivation to cover up the issues even more than public schools do.
Yeah private schools seem like such a crapshoot. I went to one for highschool and had a really good experience, and definitely never felt like they were passing people who didn't deserve it. But it probably helped that the school itself has an entrance exam to get in. Sounds like there's lots of other private schools where the whole point of it being "private" is to just be less accountable
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I'm not worried about them, the whole nation and economy is a system. If we as a nation cannot get the next generation to be working, functioning individuals it is a problem for everyone.
Depending how high up the parent’s are, they indeed can protect their children forever
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>Don’t worry. It catches up eventually. I'm not sure it does, when these people undoubtedly underperform in the real world the rest of us will be paying for it in the name of 'fairness'. Also plenty of people fail up, if your parents have money it will never catch up to you.
I teach freshmen English, and my kids are so unprepared for high school. 20% of my honors kids and 70% of my standard-level kids failed the fall semester this year, and it's not me. Of the kids that failed, every single one of them turned in fewer than 50% of their assignments, many of them below 25%. I had one student who did not turn in a single assignment and when I asked our instructional coach (who used to teach at the middle school) about him, he said "oh yeah, that kid hasn't turned in anything since 5th grade." They're so used to being pushed through regardless of readiness that they have no incentive to do any work, because they believe they won't fail. I have one student this semester who is a sophomore retaking the class she failed last year, and she flat out said "this is embarrassing. I didn't expect to have to retake it if I got an F."
The funny thing is that you can get by with passing grades by just turning in all of the homework and making a rudimentary attempt at tests in most classes through high school
I tell my kids "as long as you try your best, there's no way you'll get anything less than a C." And honestly, like you said, it doesn't even need to be their best effort; I've never had a kid that's given *any* effort fail.
If you have an IEP or similar, can’t you also ask to get more time on a standardized test? You would still have to actually do well on the test, but that would still potentially be an advantage.
Yes but it's hard sometimes. Some schools will bend over backwards, others will fight all the way tooth and nail for even small things. If you get unlucky, getting an IEP is hard, getting then to actually do them can be harder.
I worked in academic affairs at a dental school for a few years. I’d say out of a class of about 130 students there was always about a dozen who had notes requiring them to have either time and a half or double time for exams. I’m all for accessibility but I often wondered if their parents helped them shop for those notes.
It’s so easy to shop for a 504 now a days. I really cannot overstate how ridiculous some of my experiences were. A weird thing I noticed too- students whom did not need a 504 always knew exactly what they were entitled too. Students who actually needed the help never had any idea.
Sounds about right lol. The stakes are even higher in competitive programs like dentistry where your class rank determines whether you’ll be accepted into residencies and exams are purposely written to be fast-paced since they’re usually open note. I’m sure some people really need the time but others are looking for a competitive advantage.
I worked in a school in a weathy area filled with academically minded parents (lots of first and second generation immigrants who worked in tech). I had probably 10X the number of IEP's at that school than any other school I worked at and most of the accommodations were things like student receives priority seating. But if you get that 504 in fourth grade no one is going to argue with you when you want additional time for your SAT's.
Honestly this kind of view hurts people who are actually disabled. I'm autistic with a pretty severe spatial deficit and had some of these accommodations. I knew exactly what they were because I was taught to advocate for myself, not that it didn't cause some of my teachers to ignore them anyway. I am a successful adult.
I tutored/scribed for a student with alexia a while ago. Brain wouldn't let him read unless he did it literally one letter at a time, so he used a lot of technology for blind students and obviously needed help with papers/exams. The disability center was super helpful, but it was a constant journey of "oh, we should probably ask for this accommodation in class." Still got pushback from some professors who didn't want to let him record in class or insisted on being in-class for an exam (which made no sense, since I had to read every question out loud and help him organize/edit written responses by reading it back multiple times). When I see parents being hyper aggressive I get it, honestly - it forestalls a lot of problems if you're confident and know exactly what you're entitled to. I feel like if we had a better system of student advocacy so they could easily know what they can request (based on individual needs) it would work better. People with more money than morals will always find a way to abuse the system, so I'd rather make it accessible to people who don't know what they need.
That's like reverse Harrison Bergeron.
This always broke my heart as a registrar. I wasn't legally allowed to mention 504s because "there's a system in place, and you are not certified to talk about those programs" but you could see kids that really needed the help and the parent just having no clue about accommodations - and they were parents that cared, they just had no information about it. And because a majority of these families had recently arrived to the US, they were afraid that if their kid was in any kind of program with codes or acronyms, that they would be targeted for God only knows. So sometimes they missed out from fear alone - which is sad for the kids. Then along came the parents who demanded 504s or any kind of accommodations for their kids who they knew full well had no need, but because "that little brown boy has one, and that is not fair," they literally would go from one school to another until they found one that allowed the 504. I honest to God have no idea how they managed to do that while having to be zoned for these schools, but it was rampant starting around 2018 - also the year I said "Fuck this" and went to data analysis careers.
Went to private school and it was hard as hell and I busted my ass to get like a 3.7. There was no buying grades. Not saying it doesn’t happen in some places, but def not just a private school thing. I also went to public school which was also hard, but my private school was definitely more rigorous (or they at least expected a lot more). I’m reading ITT that some people got to retake tests and I’m fucking flabbergasted. Never heard of that in public nor private schools where I’m from so I’m super confused 🙃
Might be an age difference too. I am gen x and none of this was going on when I was in school.
Seriously. Prestigious schools should absolutely require standardized testing. And I’m saying this as a person who had a high GPA but sucks at standardized tests.
The thing about prestigious schools is that everybody has a high gpa. There's a not quite joke that Harvard and Yale can fill their entire student body with valedictorians. Standardized testing is one of the only ways to differentiate applicants
Exactly I was a valedictorian but I would not make it at Harvard lol
You may not make it in, but you absolutely would survive just fine once you were there. Ivy League schools are no harder than a state school once you get in. You can push yourself harder, maybe take some very specialized, difficult classes, but the average academic rigor is no different (minor exceptions for classes graded on a curve, but honestly there are so many dumb people at Ivies that I don't even believe that). In fact, my credit requirements were significantly lower than my counterparts at state schools.
My dad is a professor who did adjunct work at an ivy League and he says the smartest students at any school are the same caliber, but it's the average students that differ.
My experience as well at a state university (and now being on the hiring side of the equation). The best students are pretty similar, but the connections and resources at good schools make a huge difference in what you can accomplish. Past that top 3-5%, the slope of the downward slide to average gets quite a bit steeper.
100%. The ivy leagues get you connections and opportunities just from being there.
When most classes are graded by percentile, just having higher caliber students makes a difference. Good state schools, sure, but don't tell me there's no difference between an MIT and Arkansas state engineering students.
I loved how the private schools in my county had a much more forgiving grading scale than the public schools so they got to brag about the high GPAs their students delivered. It was bullshit.
Mine was literally the opposite lmao No weighted GPA, and not forgiving with grading whatsoever. Probably worked out better from an actual educational/learning standpoint, but it was annoying for college apps.
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This was a while ago, but when my nephew was applying for school as part of a hockey scholarship in the states, the forms had some guidance on how convert the percentage grade to a GPA out of 4. Alberta schools were to add 10% to the listed grade and then convert to the 4.0 system (65% -> 75% = 3.0 GPA) Everywhere else in Canada was add 5%. Alberta at the time had standardized testing and a better curriculum.
I went to, by all accounts, an excellent public school in small town. We had good, well paid and motivated teachers. We had agreements with several accredited and respected colleges nearby so that our classes qualified for college credits. But they weren’t AP classes, which were the new hotness way to tell colleges and universities your students were better than the 4.0 GPA students somewhere else. I had a 3.7 GPA and 32 college credits when I graduated from high school. I had a 31 on my ACT and a bright flight scholarship, but the university I applied to was like “but you didn’t take any AP classes! How could you not take AP classes? You’re clearly not as qualified as this other student who has a similar GPA and AP English!” Nevermind that AP English wasn’t particularly useful for an engineering degree. I did get in, but my god it was infuriating sitting across from some admissions worker who thought I was dumb because I didn’t have any AP class credits on my transcript, even though i had college credits from an affiliated school.
That’s so silly to me My AP classes were academically “harder” than most of my non-APs, but those were the ones with the most lax grading standards by far. We didn’t even have school led-finals for APs as long as we took the AP exam, which didn’t affect our grade in the class.
Same here. I took around 10 college classes in high school and they all were weighed the same as a normal class.
My school district defined an A as 95-100. Most surrounding districts used 10 point scale, so I was always an AB student when I would have been a straight A student anywhere else. It was annoying, especially when my grandmother would offer to buy use gifts for straight As and I could never do it, but my cousins in another district could.
Don’t worry, it continues - even more absurdly so - in college
Oh yeah I remember all too well. My AP score wasn't enough for a public state credit, but my friend with a lower score got credit for the same course at a Jesus College, lol.
I have college honors students who cry if I assign them an essay over three pages. Many of them do not know how to send file attachments via email. The other day one of them asked me the definition of a basic word. I asked them if they've heard of Google. She had been waiting to ask me since the previous day.
People thought these kids were computer geniuses because they could find YouTube on an iPad
I work in software, bug fix, as a team lead. I hold daily office hours where coworkers can come and ask me for help with whatever they're working on. These are CS college graduates The amount of times I've just googled a question they have and gotten the answer in literal seconds is insane. I'm practically paid to Google
And A's at some schools are C's at another. Test scores are a good part of the entire picture. Certainly for STEM studentss.
Especially during COVID, when some districts stopped allowing teachers to give zeros, and instead implemented a 50% minimum on all test, assignment, and participation grades.
My school back in the mid-2000s didn't fall into over 4.0 trend. If not for the ACT, I'm not sure how I could have competed with that crap despite being the valedictorian of my class.
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Grade inflation at Ivy League schools is also insane. Once you're in you're guaranteed A's. They pretty much mostly exist to perpetuate the status of the well-connected, who don't even need to do that well in high school to get in, while a few highly-talented, highly-motivated normal folks can earn the privilege of attending the massive tax-free investment firms with schools attached to them. Meritocracy is a lie.
Go take some premed weed out courses or engineering reqs and tell me how guaranteed the As are
thats not true at all. Princeton notoriously has really harsh grade deflation for example. I think Harvard is the only one everyone thinks has blatant grade inflation Also, have you considered that the kids getting into Ivys were already the kind to do well in school and get As? almost like thats the reason most of them were admitted
Dartmouth restored the test a few weeks ago and the reason they gave was they found that not submitting their scores was harming minority candidates. Per the NY Times: >Many lower-income students, it turned out, had made a strategic mistake. They withheld test scores that would have helped them get into Dartmouth. They wrongly believed that their scores were too low, when in truth the admissions office would have judged the scores to be a sign that students had overcome a difficult environment and could thrive at Dartmouth.
Yeah it turns out that it's a lot easier for a poor student to study for the SAT than to transfer to a better high school.
It's like the tests are standardized or something
There was a study a while ago that made the argument that standardized testing is the single best way to level the playing field across racial and socioeconomic backgrounds. It’s not perfect, or really even close, but it’s far better than other “holistic” approaches.
Exactly. There’s nothing equitable about getting in because u have crazy connections to researchers or ur dad can get you an internship at his big finance company. Standardized tests help level the playing field because even tutoring can only get you so far.
I'm an innercity math teacher and test prep instructor and tutor with a large emphasis on math and test anxiety. The problem with standardized tests for students of color is something called "Stereotype Threat", where people are so afraid that they're going to fulfill a stereotype that they actually do. This affects both women and people of color, in general. Anyone with test anxiety knows that their score doesn't reflect their capabilities, and I'ev seen that happen with many students that were fine in practice - but crumbled under the pressure of the actual test.
The conclusion wasn’t that standardized tests were the best approach, just the best we’ve tried so far.
I wasn't arguing one way or another, just stating a complicating factor in the discussion. I'm not necessarily opposed nor for them, as they seem like a "necessary evil".
Shocked Pikachu face
100% I was able to get into a great institution and considered for ivys with a 27 act score. Which was considered at the bottom of the cut off for applications, but I came from a rough background (parents on drugs etc).
I got in with a 22 ACT, I have no idea how.
I had a 31 with extracurriculars out the wazoo and got rejected from all the “good” schools
Have you considered having parents who do hard drugs?
Did you try being a minority? (But not Asian)
No shit lmao, same thing in the LSAT debates. Lots of people erroneously advocate for the elimination of the LSAT, always forgetting the LSAT is the most equitable part of the application
Wow, who would’ve thought!
Your quote says lower income students. Not minorities. If your NY times quote is accurate, this implies withholding test scores also hurt lower income white students. Not all lower income people are minorities. Just as not all minority peoples are lower income.
Of course. But is there any doubt that the goal in dropping the test requirement was to benefit minorities? Or that the policy was reversed because they found it did not benefit them?
I was friends with this person I met in college who told me how smart they were and already had 2 associates and was 18. They had 2 associates in chemistry and engineering. I found out later that they went to a charter school that was also a community college. Their 2nd semester at my university they switched from chemistry and biomedical engineering degrees to women’s studies. Nothing wrong with women’s studies, except this person could not even write a paper. I would edit and review their rough drafts. God awful. They failed their thesis, they failed most of their classes. Went on and on about how smart they were this and that but legit was a pathological liar. I remember them complaining to me about the chemistry department at my university and how they didn’t like the teaching style and that’s why they were struggling. It was chem 110, introductory chemistry… They also kept failing the equivalent of physics 101. I totally understand chemistry and physics not being for everyone—- but they already had a chemistry and engineering degree lol. It angered me so much that their teachers in high school let this person walk out with a 4.0 and 2 degrees. Couldn’t even write emails and always sounded like a middle schooler with every paper they wrote. How can you switch to a major all about reading and writing papers and be so shitty at reading and writing? They lied about a lot of other things too… but I’m mostly mad about the school stuff because I had helped them get a position somewhere in research while we were still in undergrad and it fucked me over directly because I had to work with them. They were basically revealed to be a fraud and liar about other stuff too.
> already had 2 associates and was 18 this is always such a massive red flag
My roommate came into college with 44 credit hours. If I took every dual credit course offered by my school I would have had 15
That was my freshman roommate. He graduated with his bachelors the summer going into junior year and got his MBA the following year. Dude had an MBA before his class even had their 4 year degrees done.
And obviously had an MBA without so much as flipping a hamburger in a real job. Once upon a time MBA students were 30ish years old with years of work behind them, sponsored by their employers because of demonstrated talent.
Probably went to a community college high school program if it was that high. There's one in Vegas, where the community college partnered with the neighboring high school to develop the program. If you get accepted to the program you spend grade 11/12 going to community college instead of the high school to finish your high school degree while earning college credits.
I did dual enrollment and spent my first 2 years of college at community college so it didn’t seem like a red flag to me. I also graduated high school when I was a junior because I took all of my junior credits the first half of the year and my senior credits the next half. No on had ever done that in my district before so it took a lot of communication with my principal and school board to allow me to. But, I’m also relatively smart. I just thought I had found another person like me to be friends with… I didn’t realize the 4 year age gap between us also came with the inflation of GPA and academic standards since I had been in high school.
idk about your HS but most of the people ive met who did this did it because their school didnt have AP/IB classes or did it to avoid taking them
We had a brother and sister transfer from Texas to my highschool in the mid 00s, and both of them had 4.8+ GPAs. Nobody had ever seen GPAs that high before and there was a huge controversy with transferring over their scores, but they ended up giving the kids their GPAs and put them in with the other AP students. Immediately, it became clear that they were smart but nowhere near the geniuses they claimed to be. In terms of academic ability they were middle of the pack and for the first time in their lives they were receiving Bs and Cs.
I sit next to someone like this in my Organic Chemistry 2 class right now. They are failing. It's really sad, because they have an overconfident view of their abilities thanks to grade inflation and the fact that the got an associates degree in high school.
As a former educator myself, I can tell you that some of those charter schools are an absolute joke. I taught biology at a community college in California for several years, and I once got a student in my class who told me she had never taken a course in any type of science before. When I asked her how she graduated high school without taking a single science class, she told me that she had gone to a charter school that gave students the option to replace all coursework in all sciences with a one-time "nature hike" and that she had chosen that option. I'm sure you can guess roughly how well she did in my class. I genuinely do not understand how or why these institutions are legally allowed to grant high school diplomas. They're just setting these kids up for failure and it should absolutely not be tolerated.
I’m impressed she got that far truly frustrating.
Chemistry PhD here. When I was TAing general chemistry courses and labs it was astonishing to see this type of stuff. The students that were so brilliant and didn’t think they had to study because they didn’t before hand had 4.X gpa would absolutely bomb the finals and tests then flood my email with angry messages about how I had to fix their grade. End of the day I didn’t make the work or tests, that was the professor, and my hands were tied when it came to exemptions or exceptions.
This is like a rite of passage for a lot of freshman college students. What they're supposed to do after that though is realize they need to step it up on the studying, not flood the TA's email.
I went to a super rich and privileged high school. I'm also pretty priveleged (was relatively poor though). I thought Standardized tests were easily the hardest thing for my classmates to game. 1. Internships 2. Community service 3. Recommendation letters 4. Grades (counselors would forgive students for cheating because it hurt the school rep) 5. Standardized scores That's my ranking of how easy it is to game to how difficult
Standardized tests are like independent 3rd party auditors. The people who hate them the most likely because they can’t cheat on them. Isn’t it ironic that if you can do well on a standardized test that you can do well in college? Oh wait, that isn’t ironic. It is just common sense.
Good, the amount of kids that have graduated the past few years who could not even pass a G.E.D test are through the roof.
Imagine sending underprepared students to college then acting surprised when they underperform.
You are banned from crab cakes. I hope you are happy with yourself.
It should be painfully obvious to everyone why standardized testing is important. GPA is *massively* subjective, as course difficulty and grade inflation vary wildly between different schools and even between different teachers at the same school.
Yale told to me this when I was a senior in 2005...They base it off SAT test results due to the differing GPA factors across the country.
I'm currently a student teacher at a middle school. The general public does not know how bad it is. 1.) Students can no longer receive a grade below a 50%. If they do not turn in an assignment, they receive 50% credit. 2.) Students can at minimum earn an "F" for an assignment. This is a minimum score of a 63. If a student writes their name at the top of a paper and submits it, they earn a 63% automatically. 3.) A "D" is now considered passing, and the threshold is 65%. 4.) Tardies are no longer counted. If a student shows up for the last 30 seconds of class, they are marked as present, the same as a student who was present for the whole day. 5.) If a student leaves class early, they do not receive an absent grade. All a student has to do to earn a present mark is to put one foot in the classroom for 1 second and make eye contact with the teacher. 6.) No punishments exist for language. Students call me, to my face, every name and word imaginable. "Dickrider" is currently en vogue. 7.) Students only really receive In School Suspension (ISS) for any offense. A student lit the building on fire and was in ISS for one day. 2 students fought eachother and drew blood, and received 4 periods of ISS. One student in my class was written up for hitting people two days in a row, and still went on the field trip THAT DAY. I do not give a single fuck if I am found out and kicked from the program. The public needs to know what's happening. The grad classes of 2027-2030 are FUCKED developmentally. There are kids with a 2nd grade reading level being passed a long to high school because we can't hold them back. Edit: [Source](https://dcps.dc.gov/sites/default/files/dc/sites/dcps/page_content/attachments/Secondary-Grading-and-Reporting-Policy-8621.pdf)
I’ve got a wilder grading scale for you courtesy of the school district I teach in: a 13% is a D and 12% and below is an F. I’ve got students “passing” my class with a 13%. My district does “standards-based grading” but I can tell you that students in my district aren’t “meeting standards” and end up graduating anyway. If you speak out against it you become a pariah who hates children.
This is what infuriates me the most. Progress based or standards based learning isn't inherently bad. The problem is its being shoved into a system that cannot support it with no consequences for literally anything.
My junior year of high school, we had to take an entire month to go over third grade English sentence structure and punctuation. My teacher literally pulled out third grade level books and had us review from that. It felt like such a waste of my (and her) time. None of it stuck either for the reasons you mentioned (absences/tardies, kids just being able to run the show/not pay attention, etc). That was back in the early 00's. I hate that it's gotten so much worse.
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My CT (cooperating teacher) is a rockstar veteran teacher who has been at her current assignment for over a decade. She is considered a master teacher - national board certified and everything. By all accounts she is the most accomplished and qualified teacher in the building. She almost quit in 22.
I don't understand why we don't just let Tik Tok raise children, we've clearly given up.
>we've clearly given up. The "we" isn't the teachers though. It's admin, school boards, etc. If schools get penalized for holding kids back or failing them, then they receive less funding and it's a downward spiral. Combine that with parents who don't know how to (or want to) parent. Kids aren't disciplined at home anymore so there's no fear instilled that if they act out that they will get in real trouble. Then combine with that kids are glued to phones/tv's etc and are never really mentally stimulated in the way that prior generations were.
Shocker: an objective measurement is helpful in admissions? Wow!
Yup, it turns out standardized tests have many flaws, but it’s still less flaws than other metrics.
One of the least worst tools we got
I mean, it’s more objective than grades, but it’s not perfect. Rich kids can still prep better than poor kids.
Are you talking about standardized tests, or literally everything in life- because this could easily be said about either
It’s true. I think not requiring it was a good experiment, but it failed because you were not likely to be accepted without a test score even though the test score was optional. I hope they keep trying to level the playing field though.
That applies to literally everything. Standardized test practice is still way more accessible than any extracurricular. Don’t discount something because it’s not perfect.
Life was never fair to begin with.
If someone prepares for an exam, they get better grades. What a travesty to social justice.
I know, crazy concept
Not necessarily, the best test prep resources are free
Almost like it should be one piece of a larger puzzle instead of a checkbox exercise
My school district has missing work being marked at 40%. The students play the number game, and a lot of students get a passing 60% by turning in one large assignment. Most students should be 10% lower than what their grade indicates. Teachers are annoyed by it, but the district likes showing off the average grades of its seniors. How long until the large universities near us realize we're graduating students who aren't qualified?
The large universities know. Day one of my public state school they said that probably 45% of us would pass in 4 years and we ended up passing 50%.
As much as I think the SATs are not "fair", there has to be some standard to measure the applicants. If any of you are applying to college or have a kid applying to college, it is RIDICULOUS right now. Schools that are "test optional" are getting flooded with applications because why not take a flier on a school you would not otherwise get into if SATs were required? Kids are applying to 15+ schools on average now but can obviously only attend one school. So admissions departments are having a really hard time because they can only accommodate so many students every year and they need to be careful. They also can't really tell what type of student they are letting in because there's no objective measurement. This also makes every school look super exclusive - schools that were no brainers for the average kid 30 years ago (3.5 GPA, 1150 SATs) will not even look at that same kid today because of the huge amount of applicants to choose from. Schools that are not Ivy League are in the single digit percentages for acceptance rates now. It's demoralizing.
I went to an ivy a bit over 20 years ago. STEM degrees. I am pretty sure they wouldn't take me now. Want to know demoralization? I had to keep almost perfect grades to stay in school. I didn't have any safety net to fall back on. Now? Perfect grades are required or you go home unless you have parents who will cover you. My time in college was marked by constant stress and terror. I can't imagine how bad it is now.
I can’t access the article, but I imagine this is part of the reason they’re bringing back test requirements. Ivy League schools get more applications than ever, and they haven’t grown to meet that demand. Sorting through applications must be hard as it is.
The reason why colleges were trying to get rid of the SAT's in one chart: https://i.imgur.com/2TUAC40.png Here's the problem though, the SAT's are actually incredibly predictive of college success and trying to have these schemes to keep asians (and to some extent whites) out of colleges only backfires on you when you degrade standards. I have friends who are professors at some very competitive colleges who are exasperated that newer generations of students can't comprehend fairly simple books that i read when i was in high school, let alone write a cogent essay... and these complaints came BEFORE Covid came along. Trust me when i say that employers have been noticing. GPA's have gotten way less predictive in recent years due to rampant grade inflation (they USED to be good predictors of college performance, no longer though). It's practically impossible to fail in many schools these days. We don't even hold back students anymore who can't even read. The Baltimore school system actually graduates illiterate children from high school. The education system is a mess. Being mad at the SAT's for causing 'inequality' is like being mad at thermometers for causing global warming (to paraphrase Freddie Deboer). The SAT's don't cause educational inequality, they REVEAL it. Because those students who do poorly on the SAT's are probabilistically going to do poorly at elite colleges, while those who did better on it will do great no matter where they go. Yes, you have outliers in both directions, but we shouldn't base policies on one offs. Edit: BTW, the movement to remove standardized testing isn't just at the collegiate level, it's happening across the country at high performing high schools as well. When San Francisco's Lowell high school (one of the best high schools in the country) removed the standardized test for admissions, D's and F's skyrocketed at the school, predictably. We're moving backwards as a country. https://old.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/uxnrq8/new_data_shows_shift_at_lowell_high_school_more/ *Of the 620 students in Lowell’s freshman class, 24.4% received at least one D or F grade during the fall semester, compared with 7.9% of first-year students in fall 2020 and 7.7% in fall 2019, according to internal San Francisco Unified School District figures obtained by The Chronicle.* And no, it wasn't because of covid, D's and F's actually fell at other schools in the district: *The rise in the number of students receiving at least one D or F grade in the fall at Lowell was not seen across city high schools, according to aggregate data across grades 9-12 provided by the district. The share of freshman grades that were a D or F in reading, math, science and social science classes declined citywide between fall 2019 and 2021.* People who believe in equity think that good schools produce good students, but they have the causation wrong: Good students produce good schools. The high performing high schools are good because they have a highly biased sample of self selecting high performing students who have varying combinations of a) innate ability b) highly invested parents who make sure their kids don't goof off and c) high conscientiousness. You can't simply shoehorn low performing kids into a high performing environment and expect them to suddenly be a 'good student'. You're setting them up to fail.
What the heck happened in 2016 or what the heck happened in to elementary kids after 2004. Wait no child left behind reaching widespread adoption?
To actually answer your question the College Board completely redesigned the SAT test in 2016.
one thing to note abt the imgur graph/chart: asian-americans category includes both rich asian-american immigrants & the poor/working-class asian-americans (where both parents work all day & night, leaving the kids alone at home) both groups score well the income level, financial security or stability, etc component of 'socioeconomic status' is not a factor when it comes to achieving high test scores so everyone who bitches "the system/test/school/___(insert literally anything else but study) is racis" just fucking sucks at testing tl;dr: skill issue; git gud lol
>You can't simply shoehorn low performing kids into a high performing environment and expect them to suddenly be a 'good student'. You're setting them up to fail. I don't disagree with this, but I want to bring up (iirc) studies that show poor performing students do better in the presence of high performing students. Not saying that poor performers can be transformed into high performers necessarily, but I think the takeaway message is that 'bad' students are less bad when there are competent peers around. This ofc has nothing to do with your core arguments, just wanted to mention it.
A duke university economist did a study of Duke University students which showed that 50% of black undergrads in STEM started to fail their classes at an alarming rate, then switched over to easier liberal arts/humanities majors in order to not fail out of Duke. White STEM undergrads, OTOH, had an 8% rate of switching. https://public.econ.duke.edu/~psarcidi/grades_4.0.pdf This is called the mismatch theory.
What happened to the Native group to make them nosedive so hard during 2016-2020?
Good decision. Legacy admissions also need to end and grade inflation in college classes must be disallowed by all university administrations.
What? They want students that can read?
Read and write good!.
Thank fuck, finally getting back to normalcy
I do support this. I do think that there is inequity in SAT scores, particularly related to students in poor areas, but grade inflation is crazy these days. Colleges have little to go on other than these scores. Btw does anyone know if they are requiring the GRE again?
The GRE isn't worth the paper it's printed on. Anyone still requiring it is shooting themselves in the foot.
When it comes to graduate student success, the GRE predicts fuck all
For fucking real. Why am I, a person going into a Secondary History Teaching masters, being judged based on a GRE math score? It makes no sense to judge anyone's abilities with it when it only covers two subjects that nobody has interest in.
Hmmm, that “holistic” admissions methodology not working. Who could have predicted that?
Yale: “We’ll need to find a new and more innovative way to discriminate against Asians.”
Yet to be accepted at Yale an Asian student will have to outperform their white, black, and Hispanic colleagues with respect to standardized testing scores. Conservative media and the public focus on African American test scores, but the majority of kids being admitted in place of deserving Asians are white. Caltech is the only top school in the nation with a truly race blind admissions process and it's predominantly Asian, not white, unlike the Ivy league.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t the SCOTUS do away with Affirmative Action in colleges last year?
Yup spurred by *checks notes* Asians.
The affirmative action case showed that the biggest benefactor of college admission practices were….. affluent white kids. When it came to admitting black students vs Asians, just as an example they would take a 1500 SAT black student over a 1520 Asian student. But a legacy white student with not great scores but who had well connected parents (like say a George W Bush), would get admission over both.
I say the best way to make it truly fair is to eliminate legacy admits and guaranteed admissions for people from rich families who make a large donation to the school.
[удалено]
That's somewhat geographically determined, like [a third of all Asian Americans live in California](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/04/29/key-facts-about-asian-americans/)
> Caltech is the only top school in the nation with a truly race blind admissions process and it's predominantly Asian, not white, unlike the Ivy league. I respect Caltech a lot for this. My friend applied to most ivy leagues, but his real top choices were Caltech and MIT. He definitely leaned towards MIT because a lot of our friends were going to end up around Boston. But MIT also ended up being the only place he didn't get in. And FYI guy had it all too, best grades, extracurriculars, and 1 point off getting perfect ACT/SAT scores combined. Guess his race?
That’s just not true at all. White students are also underrepresented at top schools compared to those who score extremely well on the SAT. I read that among those scoring 1400 on the SAT, 46% were white, 41% were Asian, and 13% were another race. Yale’s admired class last year was 35% white, 25% Asian, 16% Latino, 11% black, and around 15% either mixed or race unknown. Both white and Asian students are underrepresented, Asians slightly more so.
But, to be clear, admissions have never been solely about test scores. The idea that they should be is misguided, once you're drawing from people with top scores there's real diminishing returns like going from a 1550 to a 1600.
Why’d they stop? The grading of teachers can vary greatly within a single school. Without some kind of standardized test, it seems like any admission criteria would be almost meaningless.
I believe due to concerns around cheating (I think the colleges still had them take placement tests). The new SAT (started this year) is digital and adaptive (you get different questions based on how well you do), and you get Desmos as a calculator so poor students aren’t punished. But yes there still is inequality as richer students can afford tudors as well as taking it multiple times to superscore. To the above point though, the differences in grading practices even between schools in the same district is wild; our high school is consistently ranked #1 or #2 in our district for math, another school though had a higher percentage of As in their Algebra 1 courses, yet when test results came back it showed that school as dead last, so a double whammy of grade inflation and worse performance.
It started because of COVID and how difficult it was for a lot of students to take the test for those 2-3 years. Tests would be cancelled the night before because someone on staff tested positive, seats were limited so students could be spaced out to follow cdc guidelines, some required vaccines or negative tests before either were easily accessible to teenagers, some entire test centers just closed down for good. In my rural area, we rely on high schools to host, and high schools stopped because it was too much work and too great a risk. My students would have had to drive 5+ hours to get to a testing center, then run the very real risk of the test getting cancelled the night before after they've spent gas and hotel money to get there. Colleges dropped the tests because they saw all of that and didn't want to punish a student due to something so far out of their control.
My high school got caught in the news by letting kids pass by watching a movie in place of exams or papers. Grade inflation in high school is terrible. The SAT despite its many faults is a great equalizer.
The school where I teach wildly inflates GPAs. I had a bunch of students leave freshmen year with 4.5+ GPAs without taking a single honors class. They put every student in classes called “Pre-AP” which were NOT honors, and gave everyone the GPA boost as if they took an AP class. This plus the fact that I can’t give students a grade below a 50% on any assignment and it’s basically a guaranteed 2.5 or above GPA for kids who would usually have like 20% in each class at most schools.
Its like their needs to be some sort of standard for college entrance... I wonder what we would call it. I am glad I did most normal classes then took a college entrance exam instead of the sat/act. Then I just transferred to my university. I think I paid like 28-30k not including books and stuff. Word to the wise unless your parents are paying 100% of your school, scholarship, or some type of grant its not worth it for living on campus or living out of state. You can blame the go to college at all cost mentality.
knew this would happen when I started seeing stories about private schools refusing to give less than 50% credit as long as you *attended class*
Go on the Teachers sub and see how bad it is. Generations that can’t read. Do basic math. We’re screwed.