[ CYPHER CODE #719 ]
Equity language works like bleach on standards

[ CYPHER CODE #720 ]
A’s for everybody hides failure.

[ CYPHER CODE #721 ]
No SAT, no education lie detector.

BRIEFING

Grant here. There's been a steady decline in both public and private education in the U.S. for quite a while now, but in just the last few years, it's really taken a nosedive, especially when it comes to higher education. Let’s break it down.

Universities in 2026 are now living in a world where the SAT has been abolished and basic math is more of a suggestion, rather than a baseline requirement for admissions. For decades, the SAT acted as a sort of "lie detector test" for education systems and the students who used the exam for college admissions. Schools could inflate grades and brag about advanced classes, but SAT scores always exposed the bluff. However, now that that standard has been smashed, the bluff has become the standard.

There's a clip circulating on social media where longtime educator Kelsey Piper exposes the extreme gap there is now between public education and universities now that the SAT has been eliminated. Basically without it, a student can now get into a school like the University of California without even being able to do fractions. 

Pretty pathetic...

SOURCE

Kelsey Piper explains how students are getting into University of California San Diego without being able to do fractions

“We abolished the SAT — The SAT scores kind of kept the schools honest — None of them new math — So once the SAT was abolished, the grade inflation got a lot… pic.twitter.com/k21fLEWbao

— Wall Street Apes (@WallStreetApes) January 7, 2026

And this isn't just UC San Diego suffering with students who can't manage to unravel a simple algebra equation. The Atlantic recently ran a piece titled “A Recipe for Idiocracy,” which describes the same problem at UCSD happening at other campuses where thousands of freshmen are struggling with middle-school math standards.

SOURCE

The university’s problems are extreme, but they are not unique. Over the past five years, all of the other University of California campuses, including UC Berkeley and UCLA, have seen the number of first-years who are unprepared for precalculus double or triple. George Mason University, in Virginia, revamped its remedial-math summer program in 2023 after students began arriving at their calculus course unable to do algebra, the math-department chair, Maria Emelianenko, told me.

“We call it quantitative literacy, just knowing which fraction is larger or smaller, that the slope is positive when it is going up,” Janine Wilson, the chair of the undergraduate economics program at UC Davis, told me. “Things like that are just kind of in our bones when we are college ready. We are just seeing many folks without that capability.”

DEBRIEFING

The mechanism is crystal clear now. Schools are now free to keep standards low and inflate grades because the SAT can no longer expose them, and universities just accept the inflation because it serves admissions optics.

The result is that now thousands of freshmen are sitting in calculus rooms who were never taught algebra honestly.

Abolish the test, and the entire education chain learned to protect reputations instead of kids. Basic math became optional, and everybody pretended not to notice until the remedial industry doubled and tripled.

NOW YOU KNOW

A diploma with no fractions inside is the receipt for a system that chose equity vocabulary over accountability.