Public schools have decided that competence is overrated. Behold the new grading scale: an A starts at a generous 84%, a B at 64%, and you can still scrape a D while correctly answering fewer than half the questions. An F requires the kind of sustained failure most people reserve for New Year’s resolutions. Parents once fretted about their kids studying hard enough to earn top marks. Now the bar has been thoughtfully lowered so that showing up and breathing near a worksheet can produce a respectable report card.
This charitable approach to standards has consequences that somehow surprise the very people who engineered it. University of California professors in math and science have documented the fallout: large numbers of students arriving for calculus who still need middle-school remediation. After the shift to test-blind admissions, the equity project delivered classrooms full of young adults who possess high school transcripts glowing with inflated grades yet cannot reliably handle college-level STEM work. Faculty open letters describe teaching resources strained and readiness standards quietly adjusted downward so no one feels left behind. Progress, apparently, means the curriculum follows the students rather than the other way around.
The Academic Senate and Regents are now racing toward a 2027 review of standardized testing, spurred by thousands of professors who noticed that grade inflation does not magically install intellect. Owning a wrench, as the saying goes, does not make one a mechanic. Nor does a transcript full of A’s awarded under the new generous percentages prepare anyone for differential equations. The system has produced students who believe they are high achievers while the actual skills remain optional. One can only admire the consistency: lower the expectations far enough and nearly everyone becomes a success story—until the first college exam arrives and reality declines to participate in the feel-good experiment.
That’s the point of DEI: providing meritocracy points to humans lacking the intellectual foundation because biology is a bitch.
