Welcome, Class 2026! Part 1

You and Orion

For a part of his life, the giant Orion¹ was blind. Cedalion, a servant of his friend Hephaestus, helped Orion to travel to his healing: Cedalion sat on Orion’s shoulders and directed him to the east, where the Sun gave him a new sight.

Dear Class of 2026: let us introduce your future professors, the blind giants. And tied giants as well. And tired.

They don’t know what you are good at because the “racist” SATs have been abolished. They can not help you choose your learning path because the “white supremacy” placement tests either disappeared or were reformed to nonexistence. They are unable to guide you with fair grades because the Embedded Commissars Tutors watch for instances of proper grading like hawks.

The Social Justice Huns of the College of Education and Human Development are behind all of that. Hmm... Curiously, it is the same crowd that made the K-12 STEM education unusable, disfavoring the economically disadvantaged. And to hide this epic failure they now decided to redefine excellence.

But be the Cedalions to your Orion professors, guide them!

1. Choose a major you will be comfortable with for the rest of your career.

2. Do not use external help when taking the ALEKS math placement test: it is not proctored in the name of mediocrity “equity”. If the Student Success Center tells you to retake your ALEKS and then retake it again, and again, till the planets align… don’t: the test loses its success-predictive power that way.

3. When the Student Success Center, after reviewing your ALEKS result, tells you to start your journey through the math classes from MATH-X, sign up for MATH-(X-15) (e.g. when advised to take MATH-130 as the very first mathematics class your sign up for, go for MATH-115 instead).

4. Now, when already in class, remember that often, your C is a D, and your D is an F . Embedded Tutors don’t sleep. Your school wants to look good in the US News and World Report rankings and it makes your professors painfully aware of this desire of theirs. Aim your pitch at the job market according to what you know, not to what the university wants the world to think you know.

We implore you, please heed our advise.

You can glance at an alternative universe that awaits you if you don’t: the wormhole below is traversable clickable:

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…It is a nightmare scenario, isn’t it! Please be our heroes, avoid the socially engineered black hole of mis-placement, un-assessment, and non-education, learn as much as you can, become as useful as you can: society needs you! Help your professors to transform you to the new giants… may be not quite blind by then².

1. Southwestern skies tonight.

2. For an overview of what UMB recently became, see ”Welcome, Class 2026. Part 2”.