Colleges come running back to standardized testing

We’ve come full circle.

So it seems that Harvard has found it necessary to offer a class in Algebra because there’s a “lack of foundational algebra skills among their students”. Let that sink in. Some Harvard students, the best and brightest from around the country (and world), can’t do algebra. Yet we saw this coming (see prior blog posts).

Let’s review how we got to this point. First, there was Covid. That made gathering, including taking the ACT or SAT, impossible. Students couldn’t sit for a standardized test that was a required part of their college application. So colleges did what they had to do at the time: they made the SAT and ACT optional. Fair enough. But Covid brought on something else: massive cheating. The combination of taking tests at home, unsupervised, and the rise of software that could magically solve math problems step-by-step, led students to just plain old cheat like crazy in their high school math classes. Typing your math problem into the internet, taking a photo of your math question with your phone, and drawing your math equation on an app …. they all provided instantaneous solutions, along with each necessary step. Students cheated and everybody knew it.

All of this, together with the empathy teachers and administrators had for students who couldn’t be in the classroom, led to students getting solid grades on their math tests and courses while actually learning nothing. And with math, that’s a problem since each year math builds upon itself. These issues compounded themselves over time. With a lack of foundation in 9th-grade math, students couldn’t do 10th-grade math, so they continued to cheat on exams and in classes to receive good grades in 10th-grade math. Rinse and repeat for 11th and 12th grade, and you have students with four full years of A grades in high school math who don’t understand 9th-grade math. And back to our original statement, the students accepted to Harvard were probably taking upper-level math (like pre-calculus and AP calculus) in high school, yet today, they need help with basic algebra.

Now, not understanding math isn’t necessarily awful in and of itself. Lots of people don’t understand math. However, these high school students had A grades in their high school math courses, and Harvard thought their high school A grades meant they understood math, which they didn’t. So now we have Ivy League students who can’t do basic algebra. How can universities truly know if a student understands math and the particular level of their mathematical abilities? Certainly not by looking at a student’s transcripts. That’s where the ACT and SAT come in. There’s no grade inflation here. No pulling out phones to take pictures of problems to get solutions. Good old-fashioned pencil and paper (and calculator), figuring it out.

And that’s why colleges are going back to standardized testing. Grades on transcripts don’t fully reflect a student’s mathematical abilities. Students were able to fool universities these past few years. But as the Who sang, they won’t be fooled again!

Harvard offering classes for algebra skills. Crazy. Now let’s talk about how these same students used AI to write their essays…