America’s Hatred For Merit Is Leading Us To Total IncompetenceWhat we should expect in the coming years is a widespread crisis of competence afflicting every nook and cranny of American life.BY: ALEXANDER ZUBATOV
MAY 26, 2023
With every new revelation of how dumb and incompetent our nation has become, there has been an increasingly desperate push to blame it all on the pandemic, whether learning loss or long Covid brain fog or the general stress of the Covid era.
Well, here is one indicator we cannot blame on the pandemic because it has been flashing red since 2006. In a startling reversal of what is known as “the Flynn effect” — the name for the phenomenon in which average IQs had been rising at the rate of 3-5 points per decade since 1932 — a recent study charting the results of nearly 400,000 IQ test samples shows that Americans’ IQs have actually been dropping since 2006, with an effect especially pronounced among those aged 18 to 22.
The core skills of verbal reasoning (general knowledge, logic, vocabulary), matrix reasoning (nonverbal reasoning such as visual problem solving), and letter and number series (computation and mathematical reasoning) all declined.
The authors suggest the quality of our education is the most likely culprit: “[ I]t could be the case that our results indicate a change of quality or content of education and test-taking skills within this large United States sample.”
It is apparent from many objective markers that the caliber of education has decreased, especially after the 2020 George Floyd riots brought wildly hyperbolic claims of “systemic racism” and diversity politicking to the highest value in the educational pantheon.
School systems have begun to eliminate honors classes, and advanced placement courses are also being cut. Gifted education has also been under attack, whether in the form of directly eliminating gifted programs, replacing merit-based admissions to selective schools with lottery systems, instituting zip code quotas, or infusing considerations of so-called racial “equity” into the admissions process.
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The educational bureaucracy’s “solution” to such glaring problems has been to lower the standards. Thus, what counts as “basic proficiency” in core subjects like math and English has been gutted. Entire towns, like Schenectady, New York, have been unable to get even a single eighth grader to meet the proficiency mark under the old standard.
In what is often crowned the nation’s top high school, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Virginia, after considerations of race were infused into the formerly race-blind admissions process, teachers predictably saw the “lowest scores we’ve ever seen” (averages in the low 70s) on trigonometry exams, even though they had lowered standards and made the tests “substantially easier” to accommodate dumber students.
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The true motivation, we can guess, is the widespread expectation that the Supreme Court will soon bring an end to affirmative action. The expected change has prompted race-obsessed universities to admit less-qualified individuals by eliminating objective metrics such as testing, thereby making the whole admissions process so discretionary and opaque that it will be impossible to peer behind the curtain.
With dumber students coming to college, rampant grade inflation has taken over universities as well. Only 15 percent of college grades were A’s in the early 1960s, while today that percentage is 45 percent. Even at purportedly elite universities, such as Harvard, the median grade is an A-, and the most common grade is an A.
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Source:
https://thefederalist.com/2023/05/26/americas-hatred-of-merit-is-leading-us-to-total-incompetence/
