WUnderground WashU's Premier (only) Satirical Newspaper Est. 2004
Upperclassmen, you may have noticed something a little different about this year’s batch of freshmen. No, it’s not your imagination. It has nothing to do with you looking at the young faces and seeing a less mature reflection of yourself peering out at you across the years with eyes still filled with naïveté and wonder and childish ignorance that your many semesters at WashU have long since eroded away. The disgust you feel at their antics isn’t just thinly veiled shame for the half-remembered embarrassments of your past.
No, this year’s Freshmen Class is actually just dumber than previous years’.
“For a long time, WashU has been a bastion of diversity,” Dr. Rustin Ulrick, head of the Admissions Department, said in his press release on Saturday, “we’ve always strived to have our doors open to anyone, be they rich Jewish Caucasians, rich non-Jewish Caucasians, or even rich international students from China. However, one important segment of the world’s population has been completely absent from campus — until now.”
The department then laid out how the current class was selected in a completely ability-blind manner. Before this year, the department admitted that it would discriminate students based on completely arbitrary numbers like their GPA in highschool or their SAT scores. Now however, that information is thrown away completely so that admissions officers aren’t even tempted to consider it.
“Yeah, we get rid of SAT, ACT, GPA, AP scores, sports, essays, letters of recommendation, you name it,” Dr. Ulrick proudly proclaimed, “anything that would give one student an unfair advantage over another, it’s in the trash. Now we make the decision based on purely fair and unbiased indicators, like how cool their name is and how much financial aid they’re asking for.”
“It’s a mark of great shame for us here that we used to be considered one of the most selective schools in the world,” Chancellor Wrighton announced on the subject, “we’re trying our best to erase that legacy entirely from our campus.”
According to the statistics released by the department, the average WashU freshmen is still worryingly more intelligent than the national average, but according to admissions that’s just a by-product of the unenlightened past, since students’ internalized-ableism would cause them to self-select and apply to schools they felt they were the most equipped for. However, the department is hopeful this trend will vanish after a few years under the new system.
As for the rest of the university staff, they say it may take some time to get used to the new system. The math department reports that it’s had to spend the first few weeks teaching times tables and improper fractions in all three levels of calculus, and are worried they won’t be able to complete the full curriculum or even get to derivatives by the end of the semester.
