Grade inflation and automatic promotion had nothing to do with Covid - it was occurring when at uni in the 70's, with dean's list definitions changing to reflect higher GPA's. Covid isolation might have made things worse, but starting from a mediocre beginning it might also not be significant. People who are interested in subjects, and have anywhere competent teachers tend to do well. Those who are disinterested, or faced with "disappointing" teachers do less well.
The spread of things like ChatGPT is going to make things worse. And there's a whole lot of parents who are certain their precious offspring are (well) above average. Wasn't that a feature of Lake Wobegone? EDIT: and how common is the attitude "I paid a lot for your product, give me the grades..."?
You bring up something that I thought about a while back but never took the time to do any research on.
To what extent was grade inflation of young men during the 60s and 70s common place due to the draft for the Vietnam war?
It seems to me that there's a likely possibility that professors and graders would be more willing to go easy on male students to prevent them from being sent to fight in Vietnam.
I wonder if anyone has done analysis on the grades from the era has has detected a measurable different.
‘Nam ended in the early 70’s and I think the student deferment ended before the war did. But it’s a good theory. Much of academia was probably not on board. Perhaps the war edited out some classes of students that influenced grades?
Hilarious for a commentator on college preparation to show such a lack of command of English grammar: "That last phrase is a euphemism for low-income, minority youths whose interest K–12 education’s love affair with “equity” is intended to serve." When I was in a Humanities sequence at UC San Diego, the singular presence of such a run-on in a paper assignment would have garnered the grade of "C" regardless of surrounding context.
It's not a run-on, it's a normal sentence with a moderately complex dependent clause.
The only problem with this sentence I can see is that we serve people's interests, not their interest. That might be considered a grammar error - we expect plural objects (interests) for plural subjects (youths). It doesn't seem like a catastrophic one, the sentence can still be easily understood.
By the way, I'm aware I'm a comma splicer. I casually break grammatical rules when I feel like making things read more like how I talk.
Run-on sentences - like the one OP mentioned - are treated as a grammatical error, and the kinds of issues that lead to punctuation errors are themselves grammatical in nature (think mismanaged independent clauses).
Just because OP is being snotty doesn't mean you aren't as well. If I were grading either of you guys in an academic context (which I spent sleepless nights on in my academic career) I wouldn't have given either of you guys marks on this specific question because you are ignoring the prompt and not engaging with the content.
Perhaps by you, in one particular context (as a grader in an English class?). Your particular practice doesn't create universal truth by fiat.
> I wouldn't have given either of you guys marks on this specific question
This is funny, because you are arbitrarily assuming my goals are whatever yours are here. In the academic context, you're going into a random classroom and handing out grades without even checking what the assignment is.
> the singular presence of such a run-on in a paper assignment would have garnered the grade of "C" regardless of surrounding context
It wouldn't have been given a C, and I say this as someone who was a TF/TA for these kinds of classes at UCSD tier programs, and as such spent hours grading these kinds of essays.
I think there are flaws with the article's argument, but your retort is not touching on those.
Earning a 4.0 GPA in high school math while only knowing middle school math seems absolutely wild. Is that truly a side effect of COVID or are certain schools just going to be heavily penalized in admissions because their standards are far too low?
A bombshell report just released by the Maryland Inspector General for Education shows more than twelve thousand failing grades were changed to passing over a five-year period in Baltimore City Schools.
Yes, in fact the UCSD report explicitly says they will have no choice but to penalize entire schools in their "math index" if standardized testing is not reintroduced.
There are school systems where teachers are not allowed to give anything less than a D equivalent grade, even if the student didn't engage with the assignment at all. I would panic if I found out my kid went to such a school!
Worse, some school systems require teachers to accept student work at any time. I have teacher friends who tell me stories about students who don't do anything all semester. Then in the last week, somehow all the work gets done and submitted, and it's all passing. Obviously what's happening is the parents are doing all the student's work, and the teacher is forced to pretend it's genuine.
Then there are the systems which only teach "theoretical" work. I had a student who said he could program, passed a bunch of classes called "programming in C++" and such, only to learn he hadn't written a program ever -- he had just been taught the theory of writing a program. It's like taking calculus but never doing an integral.
So in the article I read on AP or Reuters, 1/8 freshmen had below a middle school level of proficiency in math. If you're from outside the US, middle school is for kids aged ~11-14.
It should come as no surprise that a conservative think-tank would immediately blame "K–12 education’s love affair with 'equity'." I don't think I need to read any more of this.
I actually wanted to find a nonpartisan source, but couldn't easily find one that was willing to center the actual central point of the UCSD report: that the university can no longer identify math-ready students due to the removal of standardized testing from the admissions process, and they are begging for UC system to reconsider standardized testing.
I'm seeing this myself, I had to explain to a freshman student last week what a colon is and where to find it on the keyboard. That's a first in 7 years.
The political atmosphere following George Floyd and "defund the police", as there was a then somewhat fringe position that standardized testing was racist (yet low income and marginalized Asian communities like Vietnamese and Cambodians and immigrant African communities being able to match or exceed performance of White Californians was ignored) came to the fore, which lead to the politicially easy and popular option of making standardized testing optional.
This lead to a populist overcorrection in California to increase UC admissions from Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) schools which tended to skew low income and non-white/non-Asian (though plenty of Asians fall under LCFF schools as plenty of Vietnamese, Hmong, and Cambodian Californians can attest).
Ideally, UC and CSU admissions need to be restricted (90th-100th percentile at a UC, 70th-100th percentile at CSU, and everyone else at a CC) in order to push students who need some remedial learning to be provided it at Community Colleges - just like the Warren Plan said when the 3 tiered California Model of Education was developed - but community colleges are perceived as being "lower tier" and breaking barriers is viewed as a quick populist win.
Ironically, it wasn't even mainstream Latiné or African American politicans in California that were driving this policy - it was progressive leaning organizations whose membership are overwhelmingly upper middle class White and Asian Americans who attended Ivies, top UCs, and elite B10s.
Expanding funding and the quality of services provided at the K-12 level would have helped solve the issue in a 5-10 year timeframe, but the populist overreaction now puts actually smart policies like LCFF at risk of being cut due to a populist counter-reaction.
That said, I find it telling that the AEI also doesn't mention that Harvard also doubled down on legacy admissions following the Supreme Court ruling against affirmative action - and admissions for all races other than White dropped at Harvard. That in itself is flagrant hypocrisy in the face of meritocracy.
Furthermore, if we are seeing students who need additional courses to remediate educational issues, I don't necessarily see an issue around offering such academic services in any program - be it Harvard or your local state college. And at least at Harvard, remedial math and English classes had been offered in the 1990s and 2000s.
Both progressive coded policies like "equity" via reduced standards and conservative coded polices like dropping affirmative action hurt meritocracy. To someone like me, it looks like a culture war between White and Black Americans, and those of us who are Indigenous, Asian, or Latiné Americans are catching strays.
> The political atmosphere following George Floyd and "defund the police", as there was a then somewhat fringe position that standardized testing was racist... came to the fore, which lead to the politicially easy and popular option of making standardized testing optional.
This is not it at all. The removal of SAT / ACT requirements has more to do about university pipelines and budgets, rather than social justice.
As with any metric, when you introduce it, people start optimizing for the metric rather than for what it's intended to measure. SAT and ACT scores had become so important, yet they are not actually a good indicator for what they're designed to measure (academic aptitude). They are also gamed, and people cheat. When colleges put too much emphasis on these metrics, it causes high schools to start aligning to teach them, rather than teaching broad skills colleges actually prefer.
What you attribute to social justice and the murder of George Floyd was really more of a pipeline problem caused by COVID. As someone who does undergraduate and graduate admissions, I can tell you the proximal cause of us dropping our standardized test requirement was that the many very good applicants to our school couldn't get tested, because it had been suspended. So we had a choice: don't admit a full class of students or drop the requirement. We dropped the requirement. It wasn't about social justice, or equality, or DEI, or whatever else you want to attribute it to. Rather, it was dropped because we needed students, and our applicants didn't have test scores.
That the requirement hasn't come back since is a matter of inertia; deciding to drop a requirement because it is impacting the short-term student pipeline is a decision the administration makes because they're losing money now. Bringing it back has to be justified by the lower ranks who are impacted by admitting unprepared students. Admin doesn't feel that pain. It's a much harder and longer process to show the lack of the standard is harming the university in the long term. Matters of social justice one way or another are not very persuasive to bean counters.
> What you attribute to social justice and the murder of George Floyd was really more of a pipeline problem caused by COVID. As someone who does undergraduate and graduate admissions, I can tell you the proximal cause of us dropping our standardized test requirement was that the many very good applicants to our school couldn't get tested, because it had been suspended. So we had a choice: don't admit a full class of students or drop the requirement. We dropped the requirement. It wasn't about social justice, or equality, or DEI, or whatever else you want to attribute it to. Rather, it was dropped because we needed students, and our applicants didn't have test scores
Thanks for the well thought out response. If possible, can you make this a post as well? It provides a lot of context I and others were not aware of.
I wish this was the messaging used by UCs back then. As an outsider, it felt like the primary driver was the "equity" portion. But maybe it was just an issue of the loudest voices being the most heard.
> Matters of social justice one way or another are not very persuasive to bean counters.
That tracks. I guess the messaging that evolved around equity may have just been coincidence due to the overlapping timelines, and the perception of a causal relationship formed.
> people start optimizing for the metric rather than for what it's intended to measure. SAT and ACT scores had become so important, yet they are not actually a good indicator for what they're designed to measure (academic aptitude). They are also gamed, and people cheat. When colleges put too much emphasis on these metrics, it causes high schools to start aligning to teach them, rather than teaching broad skills colleges actually prefer.
Sorry to start a separate conversation, but what other metric can you use then? SAT/ACT with academic achievement in HS in comparison to peers seems to provide the best bang for buck while ensuring some base amount of meritocracy.
Extracurriculars inherently skew towards those with money and free time, essays themselves skew towards those who have the time to edit and massage them (eg. My HS's AP Lang Class always turned into a college essay editing class during application season), and recruitment directly from feeder schools like 50-70 years ago as well as legacy admissions is inherently unequal.
Personally, I'd rather we leverage open admissions with weeder programs similar to what is leveraged in Germany because that at least allows us to sidestep sorting and gives everyone an equal chance to take a shot.
This is personally offending to me, I lost two friends in their 40s in Brazil when Bolsonaro acted like Trump, and didn't implement any federal policy to lower risks during the first year of the pandemic.
Your take is stupid, that's how discourse goes now though, stupid hot takes from people who don't want to think, ponied up as some grand opinion while padded with derision and cynicism.
It's just stupid... And quite tiresome, be better.
I lost a relative because they wouldn’t let us in the hospital, waited too long to put in a stent while giving us the runaround over the phone, and caused lasting heart damage that took their life not long afterwards. We couldn’t advocate for them.
My take is not stupid. I saw the damage shutdowns caused personally. It’s offensive to me that you call my lived experience a “stupid hot take”.
Not to diminish your loss, but this whole debate is mired in the difficulty in moving from individual outcomes to aggregates that matter for public health policy. Things got ugly (and will do so again in the future) facing something novel, where many basic assumptions we have about individual results are based on other baseline assumptions that are no longer true. The very expectation of a good surgical outcome for a common stent surgery is based on statistics from "normal" times.
But, would the procedure have helped if the surgery was expected to cause COVID exposure, and the patient could have that severe respiratory illness during their surgical recovery? Would it be a good outcome if the surgical staff were dropping like flies with COVID they would get from the regular flow of patients? Alternatively, could the procedure be expected to work as reliably if the staff were wearing all that extra personal protection gear? That is not the conditions under which the procedure was developed and its benefits determined to be worth the risk...
I hope that our global experience produced enough data for someone to come up with better answers before the next novel pandemic. But, I don't know how you plow through all the inconsistencies in the data to come to any statistically valid conclusions. I.e. we have different regions/subpopulations who, in effect, ran different arms of an experiment. But, how can we compare their outcomes with sufficient rigor to find clear answers?
Grade inflation and automatic promotion had nothing to do with Covid - it was occurring when at uni in the 70's, with dean's list definitions changing to reflect higher GPA's. Covid isolation might have made things worse, but starting from a mediocre beginning it might also not be significant. People who are interested in subjects, and have anywhere competent teachers tend to do well. Those who are disinterested, or faced with "disappointing" teachers do less well.
The spread of things like ChatGPT is going to make things worse. And there's a whole lot of parents who are certain their precious offspring are (well) above average. Wasn't that a feature of Lake Wobegone? EDIT: and how common is the attitude "I paid a lot for your product, give me the grades..."?
You bring up something that I thought about a while back but never took the time to do any research on.
To what extent was grade inflation of young men during the 60s and 70s common place due to the draft for the Vietnam war?
It seems to me that there's a likely possibility that professors and graders would be more willing to go easy on male students to prevent them from being sent to fight in Vietnam.
I wonder if anyone has done analysis on the grades from the era has has detected a measurable different.
‘Nam ended in the early 70’s and I think the student deferment ended before the war did. But it’s a good theory. Much of academia was probably not on board. Perhaps the war edited out some classes of students that influenced grades?
Hilarious for a commentator on college preparation to show such a lack of command of English grammar: "That last phrase is a euphemism for low-income, minority youths whose interest K–12 education’s love affair with “equity” is intended to serve." When I was in a Humanities sequence at UC San Diego, the singular presence of such a run-on in a paper assignment would have garnered the grade of "C" regardless of surrounding context.
It's not a run-on, it's a normal sentence with a moderately complex dependent clause.
The only problem with this sentence I can see is that we serve people's interests, not their interest. That might be considered a grammar error - we expect plural objects (interests) for plural subjects (youths). It doesn't seem like a catastrophic one, the sentence can still be easily understood.
By the way, I'm aware I'm a comma splicer. I casually break grammatical rules when I feel like making things read more like how I talk.
I copied the exact same sentence but of course someone already highlighted it!
That's the worst, most tortured string of English I've read all month.
Punctuation conventions are not part of English grammar.
They are, but no one is grading for punctuation aside from egregious errors.
They aren't. Grammar and orthography are taught together and conflated in English education, but that doesn't mean they're the same thing.
Run-on sentences - like the one OP mentioned - are treated as a grammatical error, and the kinds of issues that lead to punctuation errors are themselves grammatical in nature (think mismanaged independent clauses).
Just because OP is being snotty doesn't mean you aren't as well. If I were grading either of you guys in an academic context (which I spent sleepless nights on in my academic career) I wouldn't have given either of you guys marks on this specific question because you are ignoring the prompt and not engaging with the content.
> are treated as a grammatical error
Perhaps by you, in one particular context (as a grader in an English class?). Your particular practice doesn't create universal truth by fiat.
> I wouldn't have given either of you guys marks on this specific question
This is funny, because you are arbitrarily assuming my goals are whatever yours are here. In the academic context, you're going into a random classroom and handing out grades without even checking what the assignment is.
> the singular presence of such a run-on in a paper assignment would have garnered the grade of "C" regardless of surrounding context
It wouldn't have been given a C, and I say this as someone who was a TF/TA for these kinds of classes at UCSD tier programs, and as such spent hours grading these kinds of essays.
I think there are flaws with the article's argument, but your retort is not touching on those.
Earning a 4.0 GPA in high school math while only knowing middle school math seems absolutely wild. Is that truly a side effect of COVID or are certain schools just going to be heavily penalized in admissions because their standards are far too low?
A bombshell report just released by the Maryland Inspector General for Education shows more than twelve thousand failing grades were changed to passing over a five-year period in Baltimore City Schools.
Updated Wed, June 8, 2022 at 5:29 AM
https://oige.maryland.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites/18/2024/0...
For fourth straight year, no students test proficient in math at Baltimore high school
Updated Tue, September 16, 2025 at 10:14 AM
https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/baltimore-ci...
Zero students test math proficient in 23 schools, as Maryland boosts funding by $2 billion
Updated Wed, September 17, 2025 at 10:31 PM
https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/zero-student...
Yes, in fact the UCSD report explicitly says they will have no choice but to penalize entire schools in their "math index" if standardized testing is not reintroduced.
There are school systems where teachers are not allowed to give anything less than a D equivalent grade, even if the student didn't engage with the assignment at all. I would panic if I found out my kid went to such a school!
Worse, some school systems require teachers to accept student work at any time. I have teacher friends who tell me stories about students who don't do anything all semester. Then in the last week, somehow all the work gets done and submitted, and it's all passing. Obviously what's happening is the parents are doing all the student's work, and the teacher is forced to pretend it's genuine.
Then there are the systems which only teach "theoretical" work. I had a student who said he could program, passed a bunch of classes called "programming in C++" and such, only to learn he hadn't written a program ever -- he had just been taught the theory of writing a program. It's like taking calculus but never doing an integral.
So in the article I read on AP or Reuters, 1/8 freshmen had below a middle school level of proficiency in math. If you're from outside the US, middle school is for kids aged ~11-14.
It should come as no surprise that a conservative think-tank would immediately blame "K–12 education’s love affair with 'equity'." I don't think I need to read any more of this.
I actually wanted to find a nonpartisan source, but couldn't easily find one that was willing to center the actual central point of the UCSD report: that the university can no longer identify math-ready students due to the removal of standardized testing from the admissions process, and they are begging for UC system to reconsider standardized testing.
Thank you for looking for one!
I'm seeing this myself, I had to explain to a freshman student last week what a colon is and where to find it on the keyboard. That's a first in 7 years.
What was the driver for the change in admissions testing? Was the SAT or ACT considered bad? Or were too many students getting low scores?
The political atmosphere following George Floyd and "defund the police", as there was a then somewhat fringe position that standardized testing was racist (yet low income and marginalized Asian communities like Vietnamese and Cambodians and immigrant African communities being able to match or exceed performance of White Californians was ignored) came to the fore, which lead to the politicially easy and popular option of making standardized testing optional.
This lead to a populist overcorrection in California to increase UC admissions from Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) schools which tended to skew low income and non-white/non-Asian (though plenty of Asians fall under LCFF schools as plenty of Vietnamese, Hmong, and Cambodian Californians can attest).
Ideally, UC and CSU admissions need to be restricted (90th-100th percentile at a UC, 70th-100th percentile at CSU, and everyone else at a CC) in order to push students who need some remedial learning to be provided it at Community Colleges - just like the Warren Plan said when the 3 tiered California Model of Education was developed - but community colleges are perceived as being "lower tier" and breaking barriers is viewed as a quick populist win.
Ironically, it wasn't even mainstream Latiné or African American politicans in California that were driving this policy - it was progressive leaning organizations whose membership are overwhelmingly upper middle class White and Asian Americans who attended Ivies, top UCs, and elite B10s.
Expanding funding and the quality of services provided at the K-12 level would have helped solve the issue in a 5-10 year timeframe, but the populist overreaction now puts actually smart policies like LCFF at risk of being cut due to a populist counter-reaction.
That said, I find it telling that the AEI also doesn't mention that Harvard also doubled down on legacy admissions following the Supreme Court ruling against affirmative action - and admissions for all races other than White dropped at Harvard. That in itself is flagrant hypocrisy in the face of meritocracy.
Furthermore, if we are seeing students who need additional courses to remediate educational issues, I don't necessarily see an issue around offering such academic services in any program - be it Harvard or your local state college. And at least at Harvard, remedial math and English classes had been offered in the 1990s and 2000s.
Both progressive coded policies like "equity" via reduced standards and conservative coded polices like dropping affirmative action hurt meritocracy. To someone like me, it looks like a culture war between White and Black Americans, and those of us who are Indigenous, Asian, or Latiné Americans are catching strays.
> The political atmosphere following George Floyd and "defund the police", as there was a then somewhat fringe position that standardized testing was racist... came to the fore, which lead to the politicially easy and popular option of making standardized testing optional.
This is not it at all. The removal of SAT / ACT requirements has more to do about university pipelines and budgets, rather than social justice.
As with any metric, when you introduce it, people start optimizing for the metric rather than for what it's intended to measure. SAT and ACT scores had become so important, yet they are not actually a good indicator for what they're designed to measure (academic aptitude). They are also gamed, and people cheat. When colleges put too much emphasis on these metrics, it causes high schools to start aligning to teach them, rather than teaching broad skills colleges actually prefer.
What you attribute to social justice and the murder of George Floyd was really more of a pipeline problem caused by COVID. As someone who does undergraduate and graduate admissions, I can tell you the proximal cause of us dropping our standardized test requirement was that the many very good applicants to our school couldn't get tested, because it had been suspended. So we had a choice: don't admit a full class of students or drop the requirement. We dropped the requirement. It wasn't about social justice, or equality, or DEI, or whatever else you want to attribute it to. Rather, it was dropped because we needed students, and our applicants didn't have test scores.
That the requirement hasn't come back since is a matter of inertia; deciding to drop a requirement because it is impacting the short-term student pipeline is a decision the administration makes because they're losing money now. Bringing it back has to be justified by the lower ranks who are impacted by admitting unprepared students. Admin doesn't feel that pain. It's a much harder and longer process to show the lack of the standard is harming the university in the long term. Matters of social justice one way or another are not very persuasive to bean counters.
> What you attribute to social justice and the murder of George Floyd was really more of a pipeline problem caused by COVID. As someone who does undergraduate and graduate admissions, I can tell you the proximal cause of us dropping our standardized test requirement was that the many very good applicants to our school couldn't get tested, because it had been suspended. So we had a choice: don't admit a full class of students or drop the requirement. We dropped the requirement. It wasn't about social justice, or equality, or DEI, or whatever else you want to attribute it to. Rather, it was dropped because we needed students, and our applicants didn't have test scores
Thanks for the well thought out response. If possible, can you make this a post as well? It provides a lot of context I and others were not aware of.
I wish this was the messaging used by UCs back then. As an outsider, it felt like the primary driver was the "equity" portion. But maybe it was just an issue of the loudest voices being the most heard.
> Matters of social justice one way or another are not very persuasive to bean counters.
That tracks. I guess the messaging that evolved around equity may have just been coincidence due to the overlapping timelines, and the perception of a causal relationship formed.
> people start optimizing for the metric rather than for what it's intended to measure. SAT and ACT scores had become so important, yet they are not actually a good indicator for what they're designed to measure (academic aptitude). They are also gamed, and people cheat. When colleges put too much emphasis on these metrics, it causes high schools to start aligning to teach them, rather than teaching broad skills colleges actually prefer.
Sorry to start a separate conversation, but what other metric can you use then? SAT/ACT with academic achievement in HS in comparison to peers seems to provide the best bang for buck while ensuring some base amount of meritocracy.
Extracurriculars inherently skew towards those with money and free time, essays themselves skew towards those who have the time to edit and massage them (eg. My HS's AP Lang Class always turned into a college essay editing class during application season), and recruitment directly from feeder schools like 50-70 years ago as well as legacy admissions is inherently unequal.
Personally, I'd rather we leverage open admissions with weeder programs similar to what is leveraged in Germany because that at least allows us to sidestep sorting and gives everyone an equal chance to take a shot.
[dead]
I feel like this is nothing more than a side effect of what happened with Covid.
Which would mean if we were willing to shut things down like we did we should be willing to take the secondary effects and solve those problems too.
I agree it can be seen this way. The pandemic years were the perfect time for everyone to lose their minds.
On the other hand, negative performance trends started in the early 2010s, and this may be more associated with the phone-based childhood.
The health establishment did not appear to think about children’s futures, only about making sure 86 year olds made it to 87.
This is personally offending to me, I lost two friends in their 40s in Brazil when Bolsonaro acted like Trump, and didn't implement any federal policy to lower risks during the first year of the pandemic.
Your take is stupid, that's how discourse goes now though, stupid hot takes from people who don't want to think, ponied up as some grand opinion while padded with derision and cynicism.
It's just stupid... And quite tiresome, be better.
I lost a relative because they wouldn’t let us in the hospital, waited too long to put in a stent while giving us the runaround over the phone, and caused lasting heart damage that took their life not long afterwards. We couldn’t advocate for them.
My take is not stupid. I saw the damage shutdowns caused personally. It’s offensive to me that you call my lived experience a “stupid hot take”.
Not to diminish your loss, but this whole debate is mired in the difficulty in moving from individual outcomes to aggregates that matter for public health policy. Things got ugly (and will do so again in the future) facing something novel, where many basic assumptions we have about individual results are based on other baseline assumptions that are no longer true. The very expectation of a good surgical outcome for a common stent surgery is based on statistics from "normal" times.
But, would the procedure have helped if the surgery was expected to cause COVID exposure, and the patient could have that severe respiratory illness during their surgical recovery? Would it be a good outcome if the surgical staff were dropping like flies with COVID they would get from the regular flow of patients? Alternatively, could the procedure be expected to work as reliably if the staff were wearing all that extra personal protection gear? That is not the conditions under which the procedure was developed and its benefits determined to be worth the risk...
I hope that our global experience produced enough data for someone to come up with better answers before the next novel pandemic. But, I don't know how you plow through all the inconsistencies in the data to come to any statistically valid conclusions. I.e. we have different regions/subpopulations who, in effect, ran different arms of an experiment. But, how can we compare their outcomes with sufficient rigor to find clear answers?
tl;dr Universities should really only accept wealthy white students who attended Bishop's High School.
It's without doubt that lower income high schools have lower academic outcomes.
This leads to the conclusion that only students from wealthy districts should be admitted to higher education.
Because we would never want to fund school districts equally.
That would be commonism...