Re: What happened to the AI -- <h1>IVY LEAGUE SPORTS BOARD</h1>

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Subject: Re: What happened to the AI

Author:
An Observer

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Date Posted: 16:07:23 11/03/25 Mon
In reply to: Grin 's message, "What happened to the AI" on 14:30:01 11/03/25 Mon

GBI, as you suggest, much of this is out of our control. We have two main influences here.

The first is the long-term trickle down of grade inflation from college down to high school. The Ivies could have served as a bulwark against grade inflation, but we have played a small role in exacerbating the broader trend.

Not to pile onto Harvard, but the good folks in Cambridge were the first to embrace the philosophy, "Hey, these are Harvard students! They're the best and the brightest."

[Indeed, David Halberstam was speaking half tongue-in-cheek when he coined that phrase to describe the bevy of Ivy-educated (especially Harvard) leaders in the Kennedy administration who led the country into Vietnam, which really ended America's winning streak as a military and economic collossus. (We did have a good run from 1942 to 1962, though. That's a quality two-decade streak.)]

Harvard's philosophy was that their students would be earning straight A's at a run-of-the-mill college. It would be wrong to penalize their chances at graduate school or employment at Goldman Sachs by giving them B's when they're competing against other best-and-brightest peers.

That sentiment spread among the Ivies. Princeton tried to go the other way when it adopted a firm policy against grade inflation about two decades ago. The outcry from hurt Tigers holding their rejection letters caused Nassau Hall to cave and abandon the policy a few years later.

Grade inflation is everywhere now. Like NIL will soon spread downward to high schools, so did grade inflation.

The second big factor was the dumbing down of the SAT scale in 1999, which had the effect of making it impossible to distinguish from the truly bright and the merely studious.

So here we are. Everybody's got A's and 1550 board scores.

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