So, what’s in the water? The failure of academic rigor in the early grades? Social dismissal of “merit” or “achievement” as a social good? Work ethic dropping? Peer pressure not to stand out (you know – EQUITY!!! in which everyone has to be exactly the same?)?
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This is a striking series—the IQ of college graduates appears to be steadily dropping. Pay special attention to the two right clusters, which show that the IQ of undergraduate degree earners is barely higher than high school graduates in the 1960s. High school IQ appears to have held steady starting in the 1980s, after two decades of ruining K-12 standards, while steady and continuing college decline may be the result of enrolling too many marginal students who are ill-prepared or ill-suited to college.
This should be troublesome especially as we know that “grade inflation” (e.g., accomplishing less but being rewarded for more) is an issue as well. Is it the IQ that’s the issue or is it that “passing/graduating” has become so much easier resulting, effectively, in “phony degrees”? We STEM students used to joke about degrees in underwater basketweaving and we knew which degree programs at BU were rather lax (shall we say) in the rigor department. I’ve oft told here of the story of trying to teach an Education major (in what we considered to be a “gut” course – Economics (micro) 101) how the formulat Y=Mx + B in setting the slope of line. After an hour and a half, I gave up and she dropped the class for being “too hard”.
Now, how hard can it be in being a gender studies Ph.D. candidate now that ChatGPT is around? Why NOT have a new way on an old cheat? I’m betting that I could probably pull that feat off fair easily. Sorta like “script kiddies” doing malware, sorta. The hardest part would be in learning the absolute term gibberish that “academic line of study” has wrapped itself in to make sure that ChatGPT’s output would pass the “slide rule order of magnitude” test.
Which, I bet no one in gender studies would know what a slide rule is (maybe not even a handheld calculator).
BTW, the “cheat” I’m thinking of was to hold an engineering job in America but outsource all the work to other countries. You pay them, keep the remainder – and do pretty much nothing the rest of the day.
(H/T: Powerline)
