Used to have a “School for the gifted” coffee mug years ago, at work. Cracked everyone up.
My oldest son, of average intelligence on his best day, has straight As at private high school. So do all of his friends. I want to scream when I read his English papers - they are grammatically incorrect and show absolutely no logical reasoning and he gets an A.
My friend’s son just graduated in a class of 700+ in the Atlanta area. The average GPA was something like 3.7. When I graduated in 1988 from a very good public school in NJ I don’t even think our valedictorian had a 3.7.
I am just glad I get to homeschool my youngest. Unfortunately the oldest and I cannot work together.
“Meanwhile, their average SAT score fell from 1,026 to 1,002 on a 1,600-point scale”
It’s actually worse than that - in 1995 (or thereabouts) the SAT was “recentered”, with the net effect that scores after that time came out higher than they normally would. The 1,002 score quoted in the article would actually be something in the low 900’s pre-1995. Compared to earlier generations this one is not only stupider (at least by the measure of standardized testing) but markedly stupider.
https://research.collegeboard.org/programs/sat/data/equivalence/sat-individual
But they do seem to be well-versed in hip-hop and texting, so civilization has got that going for it.
A couple notes:
- the SAT changed format last year, supposedly in such a way as to maintain comparable statistical scoring. I suspect the new SAT is the cause of the lower scores, perhaps because less capable students who wouldn’t have taken it before (would have taken only the ACT) took it thinking it was easier now, and it is not.
- My father earned a C+ at Harvard Law and says it was the hardest course work he had ever encountered. He’s very proud of that grade. One of the few in his class to earn an A was a certain Antonin Scalia...
- As bad as it is, it’s not the top-grade inflation that worries me so much as the bottom-end grade inflation, which passes students along regardless of output. Many public schools treat a ZERO as worth 50% or even 60% on the grade scale.