u/Remarkable_Garage727

The Justice Department released a memo this week that quietly calls into question decades of civil rights protections for Americans with disabilities and stirred fear and anger among advocates and families.

This is for the things I don't say enough (Uh)
Waitin' for the day we touch (Ah)
Your lips to mine, eclipse solar lunar (Uh)
I'll see you soon but I'll talk to you sooner
This is for the things I don't say enough (Uh-huh)
Waitin' for the day we touch (Uh)
Your lips to mine, eclipse solar lunar (Uh)
[I'll see you soon but I'll talk to you sooner

Nearly a third of students enrolling in first-semester calculus at UC Berkeley are now displaying what the faculty letter calls “severe preparation deficits,” and professors say they are being forced to reteach middle school mathematics inside courses that are supposed to be preparing students for science, engineering, economics, and other quantitatively demanding fields. The letter, reported by the Wall Street Journal, states directly: “UC has finite resources and can help only so many students,” framing the situation not merely as an academic concern but as a resource crisis in which university instructors are effectively being asked to perform the remediation work that K through 12 education failed to complete, while simultaneously delivering the college-level material those students enrolled and paid to receive. The University of California dropped its SAT and ACT requirements at the onset of the COVID pandemic in 2020, a decision that has since become standard practice across American higher education, with more than 90 percent of colleges now declining to require standardized test scores from applicants.

The UC professors’ request puts the university in the middle of a genuinely difficult conflict with no clean resolution. The case against reinstatement is well established and data-supported: Harvard-led research found that wealthy, typically white students are thirteen times more likely to achieve high SAT or ACT scores than students from low-income families, largely because rigorous test preparation is expensive and unequally distributed, meaning that reinstatement would functionally advantage applicants with economic resources rather than measuring raw academic ability. But elite institutions have been quietly reversing course regardless: MIT reinstated its SAT requirement in 2022, Harvard and Dartmouth followed in 2024, and Yale reinstated its requirement just last month. UC has explicitly refused to follow that trend, encouraging prospective students to focus on essays, coursework, and extracurriculars instead, and the faculty letter is a direct challenge to that position from within the institution’s own classrooms.

The AI dimension of the crisis is what transforms this from a familiar debate about admissions policy into something with a different and more urgent character. Grade inflation across American colleges has surged dramatically since the mainstream adoption of ChatGPT and other AI tools, with recent research showing that the share of A grades in courses particularly vulnerable to AI-assisted completion, including humanities and engineering, jumped approximately 30 percent since 2023, meaning that the grades appearing on the high school transcripts of incoming UC students are increasingly untethered from what those students actually learned. At the same time, studies have documented that heavy AI use is specifically linked to impaired critical thinking skills, weakened memory, and measurably lower brain activity in areas associated with creativity and synthesis, with one study finding that students who used ChatGPT to write essays showed lower neural engagement in creativity-related brain regions compared to students who used a standard search engine or no assistance at all. The professors writing to UC leadership are not merely describing a gap between what they expected and what they found. They are describing a feedback loop in which AI enables students to pass courses without learning the underlying material, inflated grades mask that failure from admissions officers, and universities then receive students whose transcripts signal readiness that their actual skills do not reflect.

Looking for a place in either the west side, LAX, Torrance area. Willing to drive to DTLA if needed?