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How much of that changed over the 2020-2025 period being examined, though? Race based affirmative action has been banned by California's constitution for almost 30 years. Not to mention the Supreme Court's own decision in 2023. No Child Left Behind, as an educational slogan, goes all the way back Bush's first term.
The report itself gives three contributors to the phenomena:
Learning loss from the pandemic decreasing students' retention and preparedness.
The move away from standardized tests to GPAs making it more difficult for admissions officers to asses student's actual capabilities.
For UCSD specifically, a large increase in admission rates for students from LCFF+ schools, which the report describes as:
#2 seems obvious to me. The committee seems to agree, judging by their recommendations. Giving up their best predictor of math ability had consequences.
Expect this to get wielded as a cudgel against anything that might possibly be called DEI.
A somewhat deserved one, as DEI advocates have often claimed standardized tests are racist and pushed for test-optional policies. For example this from the NEA, or Inside Higher Ed.
Agreed. I should have elaborated.
When UC and others decided to cancel standardized tests in the wake of COVID and/or Floyd, various people said it was going to harm math ability in the incoming classes. They were right, of course, and should be recognized as such.
The ones I’d rather not credit are the Chris Rufo types, who are happy to crucify the College Board for anything and everything except the SAT. Same for the overlapping group of anti-credentialists. Really, this is a big win for one of the pillars of the college application industry.
Oh, and I guess I expect the scientific racists to run with this result, too. Causation be damned.
Do they deserve such crucification? Even if not, if Rufo was right on this point, he deserves credit.
Assuming you mean actual William Shockley style "color coded by nature" scientific racism and aren't just smearing around slurs towards anyone who believes in HBD... well, the DEI people pretty much handed this to them. They said the test was racist, they got rid of the test, the accepted applicants were dumber, racism works.
As I understand it, William Shockley was his era's equivalent of modern HBD wonks, being consistently polite and sufficiently apologetic with his message. He was probably coarser with his exact phrasings than you could get away with now, but he was still closer to Charles Murray than William Luther Pierce.
Not that it really matters how polite you are, anyways. "[Your race] intrinsically sucks" is never going to be a popular message, and I'm always bemused by people who appear to think that the normalization of HBD isn't RaHoWa-complete.
Shockley was widely known as an asshole in his professional career. And he actually said "Nature has color-coded groups of individuals so that statistically reliable predictions of their adaptability to intellectual rewarding and effective lives can easily be made and profitably used by the pragmatic man-in-the street." so no, I do not believe he was "sufficiently apologetic" with his message.
It's actually been a popular message for years now, for some values of "[Your race]" -- in particular, "white". Which means there's even less reason to put blinders on to real racial differences -- it's co-operating with defectbot. The anti-HBD crowd is going to Notice places where other races have an advantage, deny places where white people have an advantage, and make up shit to slur white with being inherently oppressors. If this means Racial Holy War, so be it; it beats Racial Surrender Without A Fight.
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A lot changed. UC went SAT optional in 2020, and UC had a big push on LCFF at about the same time. I am just going to quote from the report (link below) subsections on your items 2 & 3:
I think getting rid of the SAT makes admissions particularly tough. If you look at Table 3 in the UCSD report in 2024 the high school math GPA of a UCSD Math 2 admit (Math 2 is middle school math) was 3.65. The high school math GPA for Math 10 (calculus I) is 3.74. Really hard to get a math competence signal from high school math grades.
Nobody at UC cares if affirmative action is banned. They do it regardless, with the explicit purpose of increasing minority enrollment.
"No we aren't doing affirmative action, we just lowered the admission standards from high schools with lots of minorities because of our equity concerns."
https://senate.ucsd.edu/media/740347/sawg-report-on-admissions-review-docs.pdf
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