California: Harbinger of Idiocracy

[Trausti]

UC makes landmark decision to drop ACT and SAT requirement for admission

In a decision that could reshape the nation’s college admissions process, University of California regents unanimously voted Thursday to suspend SAT and ACT testing requirements through 2024 and eliminate them for California students by 2025.

The University of California will now be a community college - as Chris Rock said - because anyone can go there. The insatiable need of the cloistered ivy-tower elite to assure warm tuition-paying bodies - incurring punishing debt - is apparently more important than the reputation of their universities. Incidentally, the University of California's own task force recommended against abandoning standardized tests.

The STTF found that standardized test scores aid in predicting important aspects of student success, including undergraduate grade point average (UGPA), retention, and completion. At UC, test scores are currently better predictors of first-year GPA than high school grade point average (HSGPA), and about as good at predicting first-year retention, UGPA, and graduation.3 For students within any given (HSGPA) band, higher standardized test scores correlate with a higher freshman UGPA, a higher graduation UGPA, 4and higher likelihood of graduating within either four years (for transfers) or seven years (for freshmen). Further, the amount of variance in student outcomes explained by test scores has increased since 2007, while variance explained by high school grades has decreased, although altogether does not exceed 26%. Test scores are predictive for all demographic groups and disciplines, even after controlling for HSGPA. In fact, test scores are better predictors of success for students who are Underrepresented Minority students (URMs), who are first-generation, or whose families are low-income: that is, test scores explain more of the variance in UGPA and completion rates for students in these groups. One consequence of dropping test scores would be increased reliance on HSGPA in admissions. The STTF found that California high schools vary greatly in grading standards, and that grade inflation is part of why the predictive power of HSGPA has decreased since the last UC study.

Report of the UC Academic CouncilStandardized Testing Task Force

However, for those who want to see a degree from "elite" schools devalued, huzzah!

 

[Derec]

California banned so-called "affirmative action" in the 1990s and this is a blatently transparent gambit by Janet Napolitano (who is a believer in racial preferences) to get around that ban by getting rid of an objective measure. High school GPAs are heavily dependent on the school you attend. A 4.0 in a urban "Dangerous Mind"-style school might be equivalent to 3.6 in a good school so there is a lot of room for admission shenanigans. But a 1500 SAT is 1500 no matter what school the student attends. Objective measures like that are anathema to those who want to sneak racial preferences back into UC admissions.

 

[Lion IRC]

And so it continues.
Marching headlong into obsolescence.
Good.

 

[blastula]

But that's just who is accepted in. If they're not changing their grading standards, then it shouldn't make a diploma less valuable.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

I remember in high school everyone had the exact same grades, the only thing that was different was our SAT scores.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

But that's just who is accepted in. If they're not changing their grading standards, then it shouldn't make a diploma less valuable.

But it's going to change the grading. A professor who keeps failing the blacks is going to be in trouble.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

But that's just who is accepted in. If they're not changing their grading standards, then it shouldn't make a diploma less valuable.

But it's going to change the grading. A professor who keeps failing the blacks is going to be in trouble.

That’s the thing. The teacher is grading students, not races.

 

[barbos]

I did not know community colleges had no admission. Now it makes sense to me. I remember one of the guys I knew was tutoring a "kid" who went there, that was weird to watch.

 

[laughing dog]

But that's just who is accepted in. If they're not changing their grading standards, then it shouldn't make a diploma less valuable.

But it's going to change the grading. A professor who keeps failing the blacks is going to be in trouble.

First, "the blacks", really?

Second, I don't know about the University of California, but all the public universities that I know do not scrutinize professors by the grade distribution or grade outcomes by demographics. None. So, I doubt LP's fears are realistic.

 

[barbos]

if COVID-19 persists long enough, higher education could become a lot more affordable if not practically free in some cases.
Lots of high paid diversicrats will lose their jobs.

 

[prideandfall]

However, for those who want to see a degree from "elite" schools devalued, huzzah!

it's astonishing to me the level of self-involved naval-gazing required to: A. think that a school 'reputation' means fuck-all, and B. be concerned about the credibility of a school's 'reputation.'

given what a completely pointless clusterfuck the higher education system is in this country i can't conceive of a scenario where anything about what a college does has any more meaning than what the kardashians are up to.

 

[bilby]

My dad was, before he retired, a Senior Lecturer in Physical Chemistry at a well regarded University in the UK.

Back in the 1980s, the university was concerned that racial prejudice might influence grades, so they instituted a system whereby all papers were marked with just a student number, and not a name.

Of course, in physical chemistry, the Greek alphabet is used a lot; And my dad, who had the 'correct' form for the writing of Greek beaten into him at Christ's College, Cambridge, in the 1950s, was a stickler for the 'right' way to form Greek letters.

One student he marked down quite severely. This lazy undergraduate was in the habit of making an omega by simply drawing a circle, and underlining it; And making a theta by drawing a circle and striking it through.

My dad made a number of notes in red pen in this student's work, explaining the 'correct' way to form Greek letters.

It was something of a surprise to him to find that the student who was so incompetent in his use of Greek letters was the only Greek student in his class.

 

[laughing dog]

if COVID-19 persists long enough, higher education could become a lot more affordable if not practically free in some cases.
Lots of high paid diversicrats will lose their jobs.

When budget cuts are made in higher education, the first to go are maintenance workers, then faculty. Administrators tend to be the last to be axed.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

My dad was, before he retired, a Senior Lecturer in Physical Chemistry at a well regarded University in the UK.

Back in the 1980s, the university was concerned that racial prejudice might influence grades, so they instituted a system whereby all papers were marked with just a student number, and not a name.

Of course, in physical chemistry, the Greek alphabet is used a lot; And my dad, who had the 'correct' form for the writing of Greek beaten into him at Christ's College, Cambridge, in the 1950s, was a stickler for the 'right' way to form Greek letters.

One student he marked down quite severely. This lazy undergraduate was in the habit of making an omega by simply drawing a circle, and underlining it; And making a theta by drawing a circle and striking it through.

My dad made a number of notes in red pen in this student's work, explaining the 'correct' way to form Greek letters.

It was something of a surprise to him to find that the student who was so incompetent in his use of Greek letters was the only Greek student in his class.

Likewise finding out we are pronouncing all of the Greek letters wrong.

 

[Rhea]

But it's going to change the grading. A professor who keeps failing the blacks is going to be in trouble.

Jesus Christ, Loren, how can you not know BY NOW that using the term, “the blacks” is racist hate?
I know, for absolute certainty, that yoou’ve been told many times.

That is racist.

And yet you still think that way and write that way. “The Blacks”.

Disgusting.

 

[Jarhyn]

And why does it have to be pointed out, time and again (in fact repeatedly in most threads that this pops up into) that a diversity of backgrounds, cultures, and thought processes are valuable in any academic setting or field?

Having an even mix of all races, genders, and walks of life (a diverse setting with no clear majority or minority component) in an academic setting allows such a diversity of opinion and thought that the perspective able to see over "the next horizon" is more likely to see representation there.

While a piece of fiction, I think The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy contains an excellent anecdote about this kind of phenomena in the discussion of the development of the whimsical "infinite improbability drive": physicists and engineers were constantly trying to figure out how to make this thing, by making better and better finite improbability drives. They were sure it was possible to make one, but did not know how. It wasn't one of them, though, that figured it out; the physicists werrent the sorts of people to get invited to the sorts of parties where finite improbability drives where generally abused for cheap flirtations. Rather it was one of the lowly initiates of whatever fraternity threw such parties that figured it out: if an improbability drive can make something so improbable as the mess he was tasked to clean up, surely it could zap into existence the holy grail of an infinite improbability drive.

And while purely fictional as an account, it serves as a fairly solid metaphor for all the times across history when someone that the prejudices of society would generally drive others in a field to overlook completely reshapes the field.

 

[Elixir]

But it's going to change the grading. A professor who keeps failing the blacks is going to be in trouble.

Jesus Christ, Loren, how can you not know BY NOW that using the term, “the blacks” is racist hate?
I know, for absolute certainty, that yoou’ve been told many times.

That is racist.

And yet you still think that way and write that way. “The Blacks”.

Disgusting.

Aw c'mon, Rhea. How are we supposed to demean whole diverse groups of people without first lumping them together?

 

[Loren Pechtel]

But that's just who is accepted in. If they're not changing their grading standards, then it shouldn't make a diploma less valuable.

But it's going to change the grading. A professor who keeps failing the blacks is going to be in trouble.

That’s the thing. The teacher is grading students, not races.

Sorry, but politics matters. Yeah, the school can't order a teacher to pass a student when their work doesn't justify it, but that doesn't mean the school needs to continue to employ the teacher. My mother refused to pass the basketball star, the next semester she didn't have a job anymore. (She had been considering retiring anyway which is probably why she didn't bow to the pressure.)

 

[Loren Pechtel]

But that's just who is accepted in. If they're not changing their grading standards, then it shouldn't make a diploma less valuable.

But it's going to change the grading. A professor who keeps failing the blacks is going to be in trouble.

First, "the blacks", really?

Second, I don't know about the University of California, but all the public universities that I know do not scrutinize professors by the grade distribution or grade outcomes by demographics. None. So, I doubt LP's fears are realistic.

When they face a discrimination suit alleging unfair grading they'll look.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

When budget cuts are made in higher education, the first to go are maintenance workers, then faculty. Administrators tend to be the last to be axed.

You're being far too narrow here. Fixed.