Another way in which AI is killing the education system

Perhaps not so much in other countries (as of yet), but especially in the United States more and more new college/university students who are actually competent are finding themselves in an unusually frustrating situation.

You see, in the United States over the last 5+ years there has been an absolutely gigantic decrease in literacy and basic math skills among high school graduates. More and more college professors have been complaining that a big portion of freshmen don't even know the most basic arithmetic, such as how to add two two-digit numbers, even though this is something that even first-graders (as in, 7-year-olds) should know. Their literacy is also abysmal, and they just don't read anything besides social media, and their writing skills are likewise abysmal.

So what's happening more and more in American colleges is that the few students who are actually studied, learned and smart, who actually do read and are proficient at math and writing, are being constantly accused of using AI eg. for their essays.

A lot of such students have been writing about this frustration. Again and again, when they do some assignment, like for example writing an essay or a report, they get accused of using AI to write it, only and solely because they are actually using good fluent relatively rich English rather than the absolutely abysmal butchered English that the average freshman is using. Every single time they need to go to the professor or teaching assistant to prove that they are, in fact, capable of writing such text themselves.

This even though their writing style and quality was completely normal for freshmen just 10 years ago.

Of course the big underlying problem in this is that a) students are graduating high school with absolutely abysmal literacy and essential math skills, and b) astonishingly, these students are actually being admitted into colleges because of incredibly lowered entrance exam standards.

A lot of college professors are also complaining about this, but they say that there's nothing they can do about it. The professors themselves are not the ones deciding who gets enrolled and who doesn't. Those standards are set by college administrators who have vested financial interests in admitting as many new students as possible (because every student is a boatload of cash for the college/university.)

Also most elementary and high school teachers cannot really be blamed for this either because in most cases their hands are tied by school administrators as well: Teachers are forced by the school to pass students regardless of how abysmal their level of knowledge may be. They are literally forced to pass students who have not read a single book in their lives, have not written a single essay in their lives, whose literacy and vocabulary is astonishingly poor, and who don't even know the most basic of arithmetic.

Many such teachers try to teach their students these things, but there's nothing they can do if the students just refuse to pay attention. The teachers are outright forbidden from doing anything. And particularly in the past 10-or-so years the attention span of students has dropped dramatically (especially because of smart devices.)

Both primary and secondary schools in the United States, by far and large, are nothing but daycare centers where students learn almost nothing. This is not an exaggeration.