I think you’re bringing in a bit of a grudge with this:
I’ve seen the Instagram group of DS’s upcoming classmates and they honestly sound like amazing young people. I don’t agree that dishonest, dependent, immodest, selfish people (since they don’t demonstrate “humility, modesty, teamwork, honesty, independence, etc.”) fill the class of 2023 at elite schools as your post suggests.
Regarding increase in test scores and decrease in acceptance of uber-high scores at top colleges, I think it’s partly because many schools have become test mills, and the top colleges know it. Our county has 2 public schools. At one of those public schools, after a 9th grade PSAT, students are tapped as high-potential test takers. By Junior year when the actual PSAT rolls around, they have spent one class period per day for an entire year purely on test prep. They have NMF’s coming out of their ears. Are they also good students? Maybe. Maybe they are grade inflating, too. But surely this skews the test results higher than the test makers intended. And surely this random small-town public school in Mississippi is not the only one doing this.
So the scores go up, and the AO’s start taking them with a grain of salt. Which actually does make the admissions process more wholistic, cause they have to base their decisions on something other than just GPA and test scores (which pulled more weight when we older folks were hunting for colleges). So those positive attributes like honesty and such actually do come into play, and many good kids arrive on campus.
-Edited to make the quotes work…