I admittedly have very few skills when it comes to math. My second grader can run through long, complicated equations in his head, and I can barely wrap my mind around the new way they are teaching him to do it. I do, however, have basic math skills, and I have an excellent track record of being able to calculate the tip for a restaurant with lightning speed. But evidently, some poor souls out there are doing worse than I am, and somehow, they are entering college with these inabilities.
A new report has found that SAT scores are plummeting, showing that many of high school students cannot even do middle school-level math. Considering that high school graduation records are higher than ever, it is evident the country is guilty of inflating grades, according to the New York Post.
The University of California San Diego recently released a study that found that over the last five years, college freshmen are, on average, at a fifth-grade math level at best. The Atlantic reported that 1 in 8 incoming freshmen isn’t able to meet high school math standards, and it’s even happening at UC San Diego, a school that takes only 30% of its applicants.
“A lot of data in education is subject to manipulation. You can raise graduation rates. You can give a kid a grade he or she may not really have earned,” Robert Pondiscio, a senior fellow and education expert with the American Enterprise Institute, told the outlet. “You can literally declare a kid a graduate …The incentives are in the system to make ourselves look good. High GPA, high graduation rate, etc. — when it’s a mirage.”
The report added that even language and English skills are dipping. “The problem is serious and demands an immediate institutional response,” the report stated.
The school says that it is largely due to effects from the COVID-19 pandemic as well as well as the elimination of standardized testing and the President George Bush era No Child Left Behind act that promoted pushing kids through grades.
One thing this study didn’t consider was how intensely AI and ChatGPT is affecting schools. Stanford’s SCALE Initiative and Open AI are partnering to investigate how much the glorified search engine is influencing learning metrics.
“We urgently need this kind of research,” Professor Susanna Loeb, the faculty director of SCALE, shared in a statement. “AI tools are flooding K–12 classrooms – some offer real promise, others raise serious concerns – but few have been evaluated in any meaningful way. Education leaders are being asked to make consequential decisions in a data vacuum.”
The aim is to help understand not only how to thoughtfully use it in classroom but how students are using it to offload work. “AI holds enormous potential for education, but without research to understand what truly works, we risk locking in the flaws of our current system – or worse, creating new problems we never intended,” Loeb added in the statement.
Overall grad inflation seems to be catching up with kids. Over two decades, graduation rates increased by more than 10% and rose nationally from 74% in 2007 to 87% in 2020, the Post reported.
“If you graduated high school and didn’t really earn it, that catches up to you in the workplace…This is not the kid’s fault,” Loeb said. “They didn’t ask to be put in that situation.”
