Knowing that this is precisely what would happen when New York students took their Common Core–aligned math and English tests, administrators introduced an incredibly generous curve so that three-qurters of students would pass, regardless of their actual scores.

In practice, this meant that students could score 5 out of 24 on the multiple choice portion of the reading comprehension section and still pass the exam. That's about the score you would expect to get from randomly filling in bubbles, write New York educators Carol Burris and John Murphy in The Washington Post:

After a poem by Langston Hughes, which is followed by five questions, the student encounters a difficult passage from Carl Sagan's Broca's Brain.