Childhood and Education #21: Grades and Standards

Substack · Watch/Read · (gathered 2026-10-14)

• The current system of grades and standards in higher education is fundamentally broken, fostering perverse incentives, widespread disengagement, and a failure to genuinely educate students.
• “Holistic admissions” actively harm disadvantaged students by favoring the wealthy and forcing students into “kayfabe” (active lying and manufactured extracurriculars like starting non-profits), while “saturated benchmarks” (like maxed-out SATs) and rampant “grade inflation” (e.g., Harvard’s 3.8 average GPA) undermine meaningful evaluation.
• Students exploit loopholes like the rise of “disability accommodations” (driven by the 2008 ADA amendment) and AI for assignments to avoid genuine effort, with professors reporting widespread refusal to engage.
• A staggering 88% of students engage in “preference falsification” on campus, pretending to hold more progressive views than they truly endorse, even in classwork, indicating a “Soviet-level, reign of terror” environment.
• Universities are failing to make a persuasive case that they are educational institutions, instead acting as “companies that dispense ‘I’m employable’ stamps,” leading students to conclude that learning is not valued and there are no consequences for disengagement.