00:00Grade inflation is a massive and growing problem in California, with the number of high school students receiving 4.0
00:07GPAs and applying to college simply skyrocketing.
00:10The University of California reports that the number of students applying for spaces with GPAs of 4.0 has gone
00:17from 52,000 in 2015 to over 103,000 as of 2025, and it makes it much harder to decide
00:24who really belongs at a UC university.
00:26Adding to the problem is the fact that the UC system got rid of standardized testing in 2020 because of
00:33a sense that it was somehow unfair to Black and Latino students who weren't doing as well on the tests.
00:38Now, racial discrimination is already illegal at colleges under Proposition 209, but the universities thought that it would be good
00:45to do away with the standardized testing, even though doing so puts Asian students and white students, at least statistically,
00:51at a disadvantage.
00:52The grade inflation problem actually goes back to the 1960s and the Vietnam War era, when college professors felt a
00:59huge amount of pressure not to give students failing grades because if they failed out of school, they'd be drafted
01:04for the war.
01:04Grade inflation continued through the 1990s as the process of applying to college became much more competitive, and it has
01:12continued also into the new era of wokeness, where everybody gets a participation trophy and professors are very reluctant to
01:19give people poor grades lest it lead to some kind of conflict in the classroom.
01:23But the problem is that without some mechanism of differentiating among students, at least applying to college, you're starting to
01:30get students who show up on college campuses who can't do basic math.
01:33In fact, a number of professors have said they are spending their time teaching remedial math at college, things like
01:39fractions rather than calculus, which you might expect at the university level.
01:42And it's driving the professors crazy. They can't actually deliver the education they're being paid to give.
01:47So there is a call at the UC system to bring back standardized tests. Another solution might be to cap
01:52the number of A's that high school teachers can give, but good luck convincing parents and teachers to go along
01:57with that.
01:58It does seem that more standardized tests, the SAT, the ACT, and so on, are in the future for California
02:04students.
02:04It might be the only way to make sure that deserving students, especially for minority communities, make sure that they
02:09too can get a place at a UC campus.
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