Standardized Tests Are a Better Signal of Knowledge Than Grades

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You know, UCSD, they had a remedial math course for students coming in who are missing their high school foundations.

And that remedial course was too advanced for a lot of these students coming in so they had to make a remedial remedial course. And that’s not even the craziest part though.

The craziest part is that you don’t actually get a good signal of who’s gonna be in remedial, remedial math based on their high school grades, because the grades are fake.

Instead, the best predictor is really the SAT and ACT scores. And it’s been that way for decades, and that’s what the UCSD math department found: that you can’t trust high school grades.

You have to look at the standardized tests if you really wanna know what math skills the students have. And guess what’s happened in recent years?

Well, all the UCs, all the University of Californias, they didn’t require those standardized test scores to be sent. They’re just YOLOing the admissions on the basis of fraudulent high school grades.

So now you’re flying blind in admissions, you’re admitting tons of people who don’t have their foundational skills I mean, the, the math department has been pleading about this for years like please bring back the standardized tests, but you know, not everybody is interested in ascertaining the truth of the situation.

So now we have this kind of shit show that’s happening.

Further reading: Why Can’t College Students Do Middle School Math? .

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