On July 10, the committee that actually runs University of California admissions did something worth a double-take. It didn't reinstate the SAT. It didn't reject it either. It killed its own study into the question. That came three weeks after more than 800 UC faculty members, including seven of the university's nine math department chairs, signed an open letter admitting they now reteach middle school arithmetic to freshmen who made it into one of the most selective public university systems on earth. Read that again. It played out like a Bluth family board meeting: everyone confident, nobody deciding anything.

That bureaucratic flinch tells you most of what you need to know about how America lost its nerve on standards. We didn't lower the bar because kids got smarter. We lowered it because measuring anyone honestly makes somebody uncomfortable, and hiding the yardstick is easier than explaining a shortfall. I've spent years coaching high school track, and a stopwatch has never once cared about anyone's feelings. That's exactly why it still works.

UC eliminated the SAT and ACT in a unanimous 2020 Regents vote, citing bias against low-income and minority applicants. Six years later, UC's own professors say the experiment backfired. Berkeley found that over three years, at least one in five incoming calculus students failed a basic math diagnostic, and UC San Diego reported a roughly 30-fold jump since 2020 in students arriving with math skills below........

© Townhall