What does freshman composition look like in 2024?

In my previous post, I looked at how universities’ reliance on adjuncts and the resulting grade inflation in freshman composition classes trickles back to the high school level, depressing minimum SAT/ACT English scores (“benchmarks”) correlated with earning passing grades in college writing courses. I think, however, that there is another major factor at play at as well here: not only are composition instructors pressured to award higher-than-merited grades, but at many institutions, the classwork itself has become less demanding. This phenomenon seems especially pronounced at less-selective college, which enroll the vast majority of students with low scores.