Douglas Belkin

The elite schools in the country have been bringing back the SAT and the ACT to try to give themselves one more tool or data point to figure out if kids are going to be able to do the work in college.

Since the pandemic, the decline in learning and just the learning loss in general across the spectrum from the youngest kids through high school and into college has been significant.

And these kids who were at home, often being educated online,

are now entering college and their study skills are generally not up to snuff.

And the pandemic learning loss is a big chunk of it.

You know, the phones came online and I think in 2012 and things began to fall apart at that point.

AI has accelerated that even more.

Academic integrity is really, is just a lot of cheating in schools across the country.

Kids aren't doing the work.

And as a result, they haven't learned as much when they enter college.

Right.

So to step back just a bit, the pressure to get rid of the SATs and the ACTs had been building for years before the pandemic because it tracks with

demographics, race, and class really play a significant part in how well you do in this exam.

And so when the pandemic came, schools jettisoned it full force.

What happened is it turned out to be a pretty good predictor of how well students were going to do, especially since grade inflation in schools has been so dramatic that even if a kid is graduating with As or As and Bs, it doesn't tell admissions officers that much about their acumen anymore.

So the elite schools in the country have been bringing back the SAT and the ACT to try to give themselves one more tool or data point to figure out if kids are going to be able to do the work in college.

The professors at UCLA say this is showing up in math.

The kids haven't been tested.

They're not prepared.

And there's a big gap in some classes between those who are prepared and those who are not.