Over 1200 STEM faculty at the University of California (UC) have signed an open letter exposing the profusion of UC undergrads unprepared for basic instruction in calculus, criticizing the waste of talent it entails, and calling on the Board of Regents to reinstate standardized testing in STEM admissions.
Cudos to the UC STEM faculty for speaking out! We must save STEM higher education, and the first step towards it is to fix the admissions. Admissions should based on merit, that is, academic preparedness of students to take university-level courses. And standardtized tests provide crucial information about students' preparation.
Long before gay rights became a major social movement, I knew a highly accomplished scientist who was openly gay. When the push came to mix scientists' identities into public information, I asked him if identifying him as gay to others when talking about his accomplishments would matter to him. He looked at me like I'd grown horns. He put it succinctly, that his being gay had absolutely nothing to do with his science. As a woman in a male-dominated field who kept being held up (against my wishes) as some kind of exemplar for women in STEM, I could not have agreed more. I am SO glad I came up in an era when merit mattered. I've really resented the few times people have tried to insinuate that I got where I did because the path was smoothed for me for my sex. No, it wasn't. In any case, as the failure rates at the university show, having the path smoothed only gets you so far if you are not up to the task. By the time I was halfway through my career, I stopped hearing those insinuations.
As someone of partial indigenous heritage (unbeknownst to me, until about 15 years ago), I could claim some sort of "intersectionality points" based on my identity, my disabilities and my grandmother's status as an indentured servant.
I do not want to be judged on that basis. Judge me on my merits, and my merits alone. Nothing more and nothing less.
I have many female friends who are professionals in STEM. I am pretty sure these women would say the same thing.
In fact, we have had the discussion about the quality of women in STEM before and after the DEI weenies put their thumbs on the scales. The women who made it in STEM BEFORE DEI stand far higher in stature, in potential and in achievements, than those who came after, by a wide margin.
It is noticeable. They all know it.
We all know it.
This artificial lowering of the standards does not really help anyone. It hurts many and STEM itself, however.
Bravo to the 500 STEM faculty in the UC system who signed the call for reinstating the SAT/ACT tests. However, UC has roughly 5,000 faculty members in STEM fields (such as Mathematics, Physics, Astronomy, Chemistry, Computer Science, Engineering and Astronomy). This means about 90% of UC STEM faculty did not sign the letter.
Every STEM professor in the UC system sees the decline in math proficiency among incoming students. We have to teach "powers of ten" and that d = v t. Why didn't the remaining 4,500 STEM faculty sign that petition? Two possibilities: They know how their Deans and Chancellors will react. Or, they actually support blurring metrics. After all, many of them now refuse to use publication records in hiring the faculty themselves!
As I watch the total number who signed this petition rise, I wonder about those who do not sign it, and those who will not sign it. Are they unaware of it? Do they disagree?
Or are they cowed? Terrified?
I suspect a fair fraction of people are afraid of agreeing with this. They fear the potential backlash.
When I was younger, and my career was in a far more fragile state, I might very well have been too nervous to dare voice an opinion on such a controversial matter.
Of course, I have met some "stalwarts" who would disagree with the sentiments of such a statement. I oppose them, in the strongest possible terms.
I have spoken to them of course. I just shake my head in amazement at where we are.
I see a lot of lecturers and assistant profs among signatories -- so I am guessing that most of the folks who did not sign were not motivated by genuine fear. More likely they disagree with the proposal on ideological grounds.
The woke mind virus is running rampant, even in STEM. We can even see the effects here on Heterodox STEM, to be honest. I am shocked at the number of people who think discarding merit is a good idea.
We have gone a long way down this path. So, there are a lot of converts and "true believers". They like how things are. They do not remember how things were. They cannot imagine what things were like in the 50s and 60s and 70s, or before that. Those days are so long gone that scarcely anyone even remembers.
I was in a monthly zoom call for a year or so with some of my former fellow classmates from MIT. Mostly now they are senior professors around the world. I am the black sheep, someone who looked at my half dozen faculty offers and was repulsed. Therefore, I did not accept any of them.
They tolerate me, even though I am a failure and a traitor in the eyes of most of them.
I was shocked by how one or two of them championed woke ideology. There were outrageous controversial statements made. They claimed that it should be illegal to be a male in STEM, for example. They bandied about screeds that stated that white boards should be outlawed because they are white supremacist and make black people feel bad.
The people holding these positions were not our best and our brightest, to be honest. But these positions are so seductive that many are lured by them.
My 2nd mentor is a brilliant man. He has been repeatedly nominated for a Nobel Prize in physics. His son is possibly even smarter, and a history professor who used to hold a fairly prestigious position at the University of Chicago.
I used this son as a "sounding board" for some of my STEM ideas for a year or two. Then the son realized that I thought Jordan Peterson was a reasonable figure. The son then produced 1000 typed pages or so trying to convince me that all females have a penis, by definition. I refused to read it. This enraged him. Our relationship ended.
I do not know what to make of this. The history professor son is married with a child. But he is so seduced by the woke mob that he has succumbed to its charms. It astounds me that someone that intelligent could be swayed in this way, against rationality and common sense.
We are up against a monster. And it permeates everything.
We recently sent a 2 question survey internally at my job. It got a ~15% response rate and a ~35% open rate. So I'd be willing to bet that a lot of that 90% isn't against the idea, they are just lazy about checking their email.
I agree. But UC math and science professors are paid by California taxpayers to uphold science education in the state. The number of incoming UC students needing remedial, 10th-grade-level math has risen nearly 30-fold. If professors are not checking their email about education, they are not doing their job.
Standardized testing should be mandatory to establish a base line of who is qualified to be admitted to universities. Once the relevant threshold is reached, other factors MAY be considered...not including race or gender of course. Convincing the public to go along with this is another matter however.
The Rochester, NY public schools offer a cautionary tale here. Back in the 80's/early 90's the teachers union in the Rochester City School District went on strike on a similar issue...social promotion of students. Teachers argued correctly that allowing students who fail to perform to advance regardless of their grades merely passed the problem along causing the students to fall ever further behind, become disruptive and ultimately "graduate" with degrees that were worthless with some students being unable to read or do math beyond middle school level. The teachers struck to end this practice, allowing underperforming students to be held back until they were prepared to proceed based on standardized tests. The strike failed because the vast majority of the students affected would have been black and the black community was more concerned with black pride than their children having the skills to warrant graduation. Let that sink in and you will see why the regents face a significant challenge in restoring merit to academic admissions.
Does anybody actually think that the wholesale abandonment of meritocratic principles is helping anyone? The data in the SMPY longitudinal ability shows that raw talent and ability are hugely important to future scientific discovery and innovation. Lowering the bar on Maths will likely have a huge negative impact on future human flourishing and prosperity. Academic mismatch research shows that such policies serve the PR interests of the institution, whilst actively harming the kids who would have been better served by studying STEM at universities with courses better suited to their level of ability. If the university was really that concerned about achieving diversity on university campuses they would pay for a free foundation year to screen potential candidates for unrealised Maths ability and take the best of the crop.
I also think they have the tabula rasa fallacy in abundance. The probably accept limits on people at the bottom end of the spectrum, but imagine that above slightly above average, anyone can be educated to do anything, given enough time and resources. It's a position which simply isn't borne out by the data.
Good education with CLT at the heart of every lesson can push a peer group upwards, especially with regard to lowering the percentages of functional illiteracy and innumeracy, but it still produces a distribution curve even in the really exceptional schools.
The other problem is that although most don't go as far as believing it directly, there is an inbuilt assumption towards the labour theory of value. So they lose a few entrepreneurs and a few of their more talented young people. So what? The next best won't be that much different.
Wrong! I live the UK. Before 2008, Americans and Brits were roughly comparable in incomes and living standards, although we tended to live in smaller houses. Relative to the US, British incomes and living standards have dropped 40%. We've only just been treading water. Many things simply don't get done without the right combination of talent, capital, structure and pipeline development to oil the machine of material, scientific and technological progress.
Most Western countries productivity growth rates have slowed down. The UK just happens to be the worst of the bunch, at a meagre 0.5% per year.
Not to be that guy, but I think both of you would enjoy this piece of mine as to the why of it…and perhaps why the AI era gives a little hope (which then of course I take away a little in Part 3 after this, lol: https://kylesaunders.substack.com/p/the-fifty-year-war-or-reality-bats
I think one of the hardest things to understand for me has been that people who do terribly disastrous things usually aren't trying to be bad. They usually just made a mistake or didn't do their homework.
For example, the belief here may be that smart kids are going to be okay, and it's ridiculous to give them extra resources when kids who are struggling need them more.
Or that the history of testing used to indicate innate qualities rather than determine a level of knowledge means that testing is mainly a tool to make some people out to be superior and sub to be inferior, and that idea has a disastrous and violent history, so we shouldn't do that.
Or, more broadly, that we have enough stuff. Enough material goods, enough inventions. The only thing left to do is to make sure that it's distributed fairly. Growth is the ideology of cancer, after all. Much more virtuous to redistribute.
Basically, you're not wrong that these people both are destructive to human flourishing, but I definitely don't think they believe that.
They should not be too concerned about accusations of racism. From what I've seen with the advent of AI (although it could also be from the current crop of students experiencing lockdown in middle school), the race to the bottom is now affecting everyone. Not only are many of my students unable to solve that tree problem, they seem to have stopped caring. They also seem to be depressed and hopeless, it is sad to witness.
What a mess. It would be very unsettling to teach a fast pace STEM class with 10 to 30 % of the class not able to do the work. Bad for the students and bad for the faculty. It sounds like the STEM faculty have a plan to improve the situation. Hope their proposals get a chance.
Bravo UC STEM faculty. At Cornell I probably teach science majors approximately 50% of what I used toteach because I cannot assume that they have the breadth and depth of knowledge that students had a decade ago.
Look also at the supplement for this that steps through the math in the underlying paper.
This pre-print documents that a set of professors in STEM (and econ) did not follow the math, no reviewer for the set ever followed the math. Why? Because if they had they would have found problems. Things like no dimensional analysis. Math presentation where functions, variables and constants are all represented as single letters.
The first thing a friendly physicist asked when I ran a heat model by him was, "Where's the dimensional analysis?" I had forgotten that.
And yet entire sets of reviewers failed to do even that. This isn't just an undergrads problem. It's a generational one.
Math competence has declined, generation on generation since the WW2 generation. They could do basic calculus in their heads. They could do log-math in their head to a couple of decimal places.
Boomers could do math on paper, but used calculators. Boomers developed use of computers. For that generation the most common error is probably over-determination.
Gen X grew up with Mathematica, Maple, and Matlab. Doing math on paper was less important.
Classroom teaching 15 years ago concentrated all too often on memorizing formulas that previous generations worked out. Formulas become something "everybody knows". (Econ is full of that.) Formulas tend to become shorthand. Dimensions get dropped, and may not even be taught. Ever.
I think that explains what happens when a generation weaned on that system strikes out to plow new ground. They do it the way they were taught. The result is back of the envelope math that doesn't show them that, oops, problem here.
God help us all with this LLM fake intelligence generation, that doesn't learn what thinking might be. This is a disaster in progress.
Boomer here: This was my problem with calculators once they became widely used. Students would just input numbers and take the answers at face value. They had no sense of approximately what the right answer should be because they had no education in the underlying principles. That has become so widespread it's scary. A little corner of the world I'm familiar with is flying. We now have student pilots who enter a destination in a GPS system (sometimes connected to an autopilot) but have no sense of direction or how to read a compass (still required on aircraft), so if the GPS starts leading them wrong, they don't recognize it. There are myriad other ways to screw up because flying requires some understanding of arithmetic and spatial orientation. Yes, there are tools to help. When I learned to fly, I had to learn to use a slide-rule-like device that would calculate time/distance/fuel burn, etc., not to mention heading in a crosswind. I was pretty happy to turn some of that over to a computer. But if you don't have a basic sense of the underlying systems, you're going to get into trouble. Usually these nascent pilots get screened out at the checkride with an examiner (one place DEI never intruded, thank goodness), but not always. I recently rode with an experienced pilot who landed the wrong way on a runway. And he landed too fast. I kept my mouth shut because at no time were we really in danger, but boy, was it scary to know this guy has been flying around so long with that kind of misjudgment going on.
Cudos to the UC STEM faculty for speaking out! We must save STEM higher education, and the first step towards it is to fix the admissions. Admissions should based on merit, that is, academic preparedness of students to take university-level courses. And standardtized tests provide crucial information about students' preparation.
Long before gay rights became a major social movement, I knew a highly accomplished scientist who was openly gay. When the push came to mix scientists' identities into public information, I asked him if identifying him as gay to others when talking about his accomplishments would matter to him. He looked at me like I'd grown horns. He put it succinctly, that his being gay had absolutely nothing to do with his science. As a woman in a male-dominated field who kept being held up (against my wishes) as some kind of exemplar for women in STEM, I could not have agreed more. I am SO glad I came up in an era when merit mattered. I've really resented the few times people have tried to insinuate that I got where I did because the path was smoothed for me for my sex. No, it wasn't. In any case, as the failure rates at the university show, having the path smoothed only gets you so far if you are not up to the task. By the time I was halfway through my career, I stopped hearing those insinuations.
As someone of partial indigenous heritage (unbeknownst to me, until about 15 years ago), I could claim some sort of "intersectionality points" based on my identity, my disabilities and my grandmother's status as an indentured servant.
I do not want to be judged on that basis. Judge me on my merits, and my merits alone. Nothing more and nothing less.
I have many female friends who are professionals in STEM. I am pretty sure these women would say the same thing.
In fact, we have had the discussion about the quality of women in STEM before and after the DEI weenies put their thumbs on the scales. The women who made it in STEM BEFORE DEI stand far higher in stature, in potential and in achievements, than those who came after, by a wide margin.
It is noticeable. They all know it.
We all know it.
This artificial lowering of the standards does not really help anyone. It hurts many and STEM itself, however.
Bravo to the 500 STEM faculty in the UC system who signed the call for reinstating the SAT/ACT tests. However, UC has roughly 5,000 faculty members in STEM fields (such as Mathematics, Physics, Astronomy, Chemistry, Computer Science, Engineering and Astronomy). This means about 90% of UC STEM faculty did not sign the letter.
This arithmetic consideration did cross my mind as well...
Every STEM professor in the UC system sees the decline in math proficiency among incoming students. We have to teach "powers of ten" and that d = v t. Why didn't the remaining 4,500 STEM faculty sign that petition? Two possibilities: They know how their Deans and Chancellors will react. Or, they actually support blurring metrics. After all, many of them now refuse to use publication records in hiring the faculty themselves!
Alas, I cannot offer a counter argument…
As I watch the total number who signed this petition rise, I wonder about those who do not sign it, and those who will not sign it. Are they unaware of it? Do they disagree?
Or are they cowed? Terrified?
I suspect a fair fraction of people are afraid of agreeing with this. They fear the potential backlash.
When I was younger, and my career was in a far more fragile state, I might very well have been too nervous to dare voice an opinion on such a controversial matter.
Of course, I have met some "stalwarts" who would disagree with the sentiments of such a statement. I oppose them, in the strongest possible terms.
I have spoken to them of course. I just shake my head in amazement at where we are.
I see a lot of lecturers and assistant profs among signatories -- so I am guessing that most of the folks who did not sign were not motivated by genuine fear. More likely they disagree with the proposal on ideological grounds.
The woke mind virus is running rampant, even in STEM. We can even see the effects here on Heterodox STEM, to be honest. I am shocked at the number of people who think discarding merit is a good idea.
We have gone a long way down this path. So, there are a lot of converts and "true believers". They like how things are. They do not remember how things were. They cannot imagine what things were like in the 50s and 60s and 70s, or before that. Those days are so long gone that scarcely anyone even remembers.
I was in a monthly zoom call for a year or so with some of my former fellow classmates from MIT. Mostly now they are senior professors around the world. I am the black sheep, someone who looked at my half dozen faculty offers and was repulsed. Therefore, I did not accept any of them.
They tolerate me, even though I am a failure and a traitor in the eyes of most of them.
I was shocked by how one or two of them championed woke ideology. There were outrageous controversial statements made. They claimed that it should be illegal to be a male in STEM, for example. They bandied about screeds that stated that white boards should be outlawed because they are white supremacist and make black people feel bad.
The people holding these positions were not our best and our brightest, to be honest. But these positions are so seductive that many are lured by them.
My 2nd mentor is a brilliant man. He has been repeatedly nominated for a Nobel Prize in physics. His son is possibly even smarter, and a history professor who used to hold a fairly prestigious position at the University of Chicago.
I used this son as a "sounding board" for some of my STEM ideas for a year or two. Then the son realized that I thought Jordan Peterson was a reasonable figure. The son then produced 1000 typed pages or so trying to convince me that all females have a penis, by definition. I refused to read it. This enraged him. Our relationship ended.
I do not know what to make of this. The history professor son is married with a child. But he is so seduced by the woke mob that he has succumbed to its charms. It astounds me that someone that intelligent could be swayed in this way, against rationality and common sense.
We are up against a monster. And it permeates everything.
We recently sent a 2 question survey internally at my job. It got a ~15% response rate and a ~35% open rate. So I'd be willing to bet that a lot of that 90% isn't against the idea, they are just lazy about checking their email.
I agree. But UC math and science professors are paid by California taxpayers to uphold science education in the state. The number of incoming UC students needing remedial, 10th-grade-level math has risen nearly 30-fold. If professors are not checking their email about education, they are not doing their job.
Standardized testing should be mandatory to establish a base line of who is qualified to be admitted to universities. Once the relevant threshold is reached, other factors MAY be considered...not including race or gender of course. Convincing the public to go along with this is another matter however.
The Rochester, NY public schools offer a cautionary tale here. Back in the 80's/early 90's the teachers union in the Rochester City School District went on strike on a similar issue...social promotion of students. Teachers argued correctly that allowing students who fail to perform to advance regardless of their grades merely passed the problem along causing the students to fall ever further behind, become disruptive and ultimately "graduate" with degrees that were worthless with some students being unable to read or do math beyond middle school level. The teachers struck to end this practice, allowing underperforming students to be held back until they were prepared to proceed based on standardized tests. The strike failed because the vast majority of the students affected would have been black and the black community was more concerned with black pride than their children having the skills to warrant graduation. Let that sink in and you will see why the regents face a significant challenge in restoring merit to academic admissions.
Does anybody actually think that the wholesale abandonment of meritocratic principles is helping anyone? The data in the SMPY longitudinal ability shows that raw talent and ability are hugely important to future scientific discovery and innovation. Lowering the bar on Maths will likely have a huge negative impact on future human flourishing and prosperity. Academic mismatch research shows that such policies serve the PR interests of the institution, whilst actively harming the kids who would have been better served by studying STEM at universities with courses better suited to their level of ability. If the university was really that concerned about achieving diversity on university campuses they would pay for a free foundation year to screen potential candidates for unrealised Maths ability and take the best of the crop.
They actually do think that. Equity is an ultimate goal, human flourishing be damned.
I also think they have the tabula rasa fallacy in abundance. The probably accept limits on people at the bottom end of the spectrum, but imagine that above slightly above average, anyone can be educated to do anything, given enough time and resources. It's a position which simply isn't borne out by the data.
Good education with CLT at the heart of every lesson can push a peer group upwards, especially with regard to lowering the percentages of functional illiteracy and innumeracy, but it still produces a distribution curve even in the really exceptional schools.
The other problem is that although most don't go as far as believing it directly, there is an inbuilt assumption towards the labour theory of value. So they lose a few entrepreneurs and a few of their more talented young people. So what? The next best won't be that much different.
Wrong! I live the UK. Before 2008, Americans and Brits were roughly comparable in incomes and living standards, although we tended to live in smaller houses. Relative to the US, British incomes and living standards have dropped 40%. We've only just been treading water. Many things simply don't get done without the right combination of talent, capital, structure and pipeline development to oil the machine of material, scientific and technological progress.
Most Western countries productivity growth rates have slowed down. The UK just happens to be the worst of the bunch, at a meagre 0.5% per year.
Not to be that guy, but I think both of you would enjoy this piece of mine as to the why of it…and perhaps why the AI era gives a little hope (which then of course I take away a little in Part 3 after this, lol: https://kylesaunders.substack.com/p/the-fifty-year-war-or-reality-bats
I think one of the hardest things to understand for me has been that people who do terribly disastrous things usually aren't trying to be bad. They usually just made a mistake or didn't do their homework.
For example, the belief here may be that smart kids are going to be okay, and it's ridiculous to give them extra resources when kids who are struggling need them more.
Or that the history of testing used to indicate innate qualities rather than determine a level of knowledge means that testing is mainly a tool to make some people out to be superior and sub to be inferior, and that idea has a disastrous and violent history, so we shouldn't do that.
Or, more broadly, that we have enough stuff. Enough material goods, enough inventions. The only thing left to do is to make sure that it's distributed fairly. Growth is the ideology of cancer, after all. Much more virtuous to redistribute.
Basically, you're not wrong that these people both are destructive to human flourishing, but I definitely don't think they believe that.
The path to wisdom is paved with reality.
Stop nibbling around the edges on this:
Defund, dismantle, and re-invent higher education--Now.
We need a total re-think as to what we are doing on campus. Anything else is nothing but deck chairs on the Titanic.
They should not be too concerned about accusations of racism. From what I've seen with the advent of AI (although it could also be from the current crop of students experiencing lockdown in middle school), the race to the bottom is now affecting everyone. Not only are many of my students unable to solve that tree problem, they seem to have stopped caring. They also seem to be depressed and hopeless, it is sad to witness.
Ignorance and outright stupidity are such a small price to pay for robust DEI programs.....
Good one.
I hope they are a vanguard for a return to merit over DEI with its overt racism.
What a mess. It would be very unsettling to teach a fast pace STEM class with 10 to 30 % of the class not able to do the work. Bad for the students and bad for the faculty. It sounds like the STEM faculty have a plan to improve the situation. Hope their proposals get a chance.
Cheers to all those brave profs standing up for STEM specifically and for academia generally!
Without standards, STEM is in trouble.
I am sorry to say this. It should be obvious.
Bravo UC STEM faculty. At Cornell I probably teach science majors approximately 50% of what I used toteach because I cannot assume that they have the breadth and depth of knowledge that students had a decade ago.
Thanks for you acknowledgement of reality!
thanks,
randy
I would go further than that letter. I would declare a national emergency in STEM for math.
This pre-print's antecedent was rejected by a professor in a physics field who wrote that he wasn't sure divide by zero was a problem.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08723
Look also at the supplement for this that steps through the math in the underlying paper.
This pre-print documents that a set of professors in STEM (and econ) did not follow the math, no reviewer for the set ever followed the math. Why? Because if they had they would have found problems. Things like no dimensional analysis. Math presentation where functions, variables and constants are all represented as single letters.
The first thing a friendly physicist asked when I ran a heat model by him was, "Where's the dimensional analysis?" I had forgotten that.
And yet entire sets of reviewers failed to do even that. This isn't just an undergrads problem. It's a generational one.
Math competence has declined, generation on generation since the WW2 generation. They could do basic calculus in their heads. They could do log-math in their head to a couple of decimal places.
Boomers could do math on paper, but used calculators. Boomers developed use of computers. For that generation the most common error is probably over-determination.
Gen X grew up with Mathematica, Maple, and Matlab. Doing math on paper was less important.
Classroom teaching 15 years ago concentrated all too often on memorizing formulas that previous generations worked out. Formulas become something "everybody knows". (Econ is full of that.) Formulas tend to become shorthand. Dimensions get dropped, and may not even be taught. Ever.
I think that explains what happens when a generation weaned on that system strikes out to plow new ground. They do it the way they were taught. The result is back of the envelope math that doesn't show them that, oops, problem here.
God help us all with this LLM fake intelligence generation, that doesn't learn what thinking might be. This is a disaster in progress.
Boomer here: This was my problem with calculators once they became widely used. Students would just input numbers and take the answers at face value. They had no sense of approximately what the right answer should be because they had no education in the underlying principles. That has become so widespread it's scary. A little corner of the world I'm familiar with is flying. We now have student pilots who enter a destination in a GPS system (sometimes connected to an autopilot) but have no sense of direction or how to read a compass (still required on aircraft), so if the GPS starts leading them wrong, they don't recognize it. There are myriad other ways to screw up because flying requires some understanding of arithmetic and spatial orientation. Yes, there are tools to help. When I learned to fly, I had to learn to use a slide-rule-like device that would calculate time/distance/fuel burn, etc., not to mention heading in a crosswind. I was pretty happy to turn some of that over to a computer. But if you don't have a basic sense of the underlying systems, you're going to get into trouble. Usually these nascent pilots get screened out at the checkride with an examiner (one place DEI never intruded, thank goodness), but not always. I recently rode with an experienced pilot who landed the wrong way on a runway. And he landed too fast. I kept my mouth shut because at no time were we really in danger, but boy, was it scary to know this guy has been flying around so long with that kind of misjudgment going on.
The Chronicle of Higher Ed has written about the open-letter and the problem it describes:
https://www.chronicle.com/article/test-optional-policy-resulted-in-severely-underprepared-stem-students-uc-faculty-say?utm_campaign=campaign_18308040_nl_Academe-Today_date_20260528&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Iterable&sra=true