Hundreds of professors in the University of California system have signed a publicly-released policy letter stating that UC should reinstate its SAT/ACT testing requirement due to a noticeable drop in the preparedness of enrolling freshmen. The LA Times has comments on the UC faculty letter from members of the UC faculty and UC administration, as well as information on possible next steps for UC testing policy:

[Excerpts]

More than 600 University of California faculty members, led by mathematicians at UC Berkeley, are calling on the system to reinstate standardized testing requirements for science, technology, engineering and mathematics applicants, saying that six years of test-free admissions has not reliably assessed readiness and professors are often teaching middle school math to incoming students.

Without standardized testing in admissions, professors said they don’t know whether incoming students can handle college-level math. The open letter, addressed to top UC leaders, asks for SAT or ACT exams to be required beginning in fall 2027 and for STEM faculty to be given formal oversight of readiness standards in their majors.

“We now observe preparation gaps so severe that instructors must reteach middle-school mathematics while simultaneously teaching the material students need for sciences, engineering, economics, and other quantitatively demanding fields,” they warned.

Over three years — from fall 2021 to fall 2023 — the letter said, at least 20% of Berkeley first-semester calculus students who took a diagnostic exam showed deficits. “Basic mathematical fluency is analogous to literacy; without it, success in university-level STEM becomes structurally unattainable for students,” faculty wrote.

The letter lands days before the UC Academic Senate’s Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools is scheduled to discuss system-wide admissions changes, which could be the first step toward a possible return of standardized testing at the nation’s largest public research university system.

UC’s policy — as well as California State University‘s — permits applicants to submit scores for course placement purposes, but only after admissions decisions have been made.

UC leadership has not formally endorsed the faculty letter on testing, but system leaders said Wednesday that they were listening to the underlying concerns.

Rachel Zaentz, a UC spokesperson, said in a statement that the system “will continue to focus on strengthening instruction, collaboration and support” for math readiness in partnership with K-12 and higher education institutions.

Fissures have erupted within UC over admissions tests and math readiness. In November, a UC San Diego Academic Senate work group report said it documented a roughly thirty-fold increase between 2020 and 2025 in incoming first-year students whose math skills tested below high school level. The report said 70% of those students fell below middle school levels.

Work group members advocated for a “systemwide reexamination of standardized testing, as many peer institutions have already done.”
Zvezda Stankova, a teaching professor in the Berkeley mathematics department who is one of the letter’s lead organizers, said the impetus to publicly speak out came in part from her own classrooms. She described a challenging spring 2023 calculus II class, which stood out in her nearly 30 years of teaching.

“Something had changed drastically. The bottom was taken out, and there were 25 to 30% of the students who were in free fall. There was nothing you could do for them. They were just not prepared.”

Stankova said her colleagues were bracing for sharp criticism. “Our letter is going to be attacked from all sides,” she said. The math professor argued that the SAT push was in aid of disadvantaged students.

“I don’t see SAT hurting diversity. I actually see it helping it, because you have right now the lack of SATs hurting the underrepresented minorities. You give them a ticket, an entrance ticket to a great university system like UC, only that they fail. How is that diversity?” Stankova said.

Not all see a return to testing as the best path. A September 2025 report by Saul Geiser of the UC Berkeley Center for Studies in Higher Education and a former senior UC admissions official, said the SAT is “a poor fit for America’s public universities.”

Geiser argued that the high school GPA outperforms the SAT in predicting first-year student success once income and race are controlled. He also argued that ranking applicants by SAT scores ends up disadvantaging high-achieving low-income, first-generation and underrepresented minorities.

Any change to UC admissions requirements must move through the Academic Senate admissions board committee before going to the Board of Regents. Minutes from the admissions board‘s March 6 meeting show members signaled tentative interest in eventually requiring 11th-grade Smarter Balanced assessment scores for California residents and SAT or ACT scores for nonresidents.

The board plans to submit an initial draft by Sunday and a “final road map” by June 30.

 
The Daily Caller has more information about the UC faculty open letter.

[Excerpts]

Hundreds of University of California (UC) faculty signed an open letter Tuesday demanding a return to mandatory mathematical standardized testing in college admissions.

The letter, now signed by over 550 STEM professors from various UC campuses, alerted the university president, Board of Regents and academic Senate of students’ failing performances in mathematical subjects, warning of “preparation gaps so severe that instructors must re-teach middle school mathematics.”

UC removed its mandatory standardized testing admission requirements in 2020, joining over a thousand other universities that implemented similar policies in the wake of COVID-19 school disruptions. UC currently evaluates student applications based on GPA and “subject” requirements, as well as a student essay.

The UC admissions website notes that math requirements may be completed by coursework from “7th and/or 8th grade.”

The faculty called the test-optional policy a “permanent vulnerability” in a world of “severe grade inflation and AI-assisted application essays.”

The faculty letter demanded the “reinstatement of the SAT/ACT mathematics requirement for applicants to STEM majors beginning with the 2027 admissions cycle,” warning that UC’s mission as an “engine of social mobility” is “at risk.”

The letter observed rapidly declining levels of student preparation for college math coursework, citing a UC-San Diego study from November 2025. In 5 years, the number of students with math skills below a high school level increased “nearly thirtyfold.” Nearly 70 percent of those students had math skills below a middle school level.

UC Berkeley found that nearly one-third of first-semester calculus students showed “severe preparation deficits” in diagnostic testing from 2021 to 2023.

Additionally, university faculty complained of the strain imposed on their classes by students’ diminishing capabilities. The letter noted that students take longer to complete required coursework and are less prepared for advanced classes. Moreover, professors face mounting pressure to reduce the level of academic rigor.

Of the top 46 universities, excluding the UC colleges, the signatories noted that over one-third required standardized testing, including “all other leading STEM universities, including UC’s primary peers.”

The letter also took a hit at the common equity complaint used against standardized testing, as a 2023 article by the National Education Association asserts: “Most of us know that standardized tests are inaccurate, inequitable, and often ineffective at gauging what students actually know.”

The UC faculty responded to this claim, saying, the “SAT/ACT mathematics requirement is not an obstacle to equity; rather it is a prerequisite for it. Failing to measure preparation gaps does not remove barriers; it moves them into the classroom, where they become harder to overcome.”

The letter concluded by demanding the university give faculty oversight in determining “readiness standards” and “admissions policies.” Faculty also insisted that the university hold itself accountable by regularly testing and revising admissions standards.

 
Inside Higher Ed has additional details about the letter, and a response by UC:

[Excerpts]

More than 800 professors in the University of California system, including seven of nine math department chairs, are calling on system leaders to reinstate SAT/ACT testing requirements for applicants to STEM majors, citing a “widening divergence in mathematical preparation levels within the same classroom.”

In an open letter, the faculty members pointed to a November report from the University of California San Diego Senate-Administration Workgroup on Admissions, which revealed that the number of first-year students with math skills below a middle school level increased nearly 30-fold since 2020, when the system first suspended its standardized testing requirements.

“We now observe preparation gaps so severe that instructors must reteach middle-school mathematics while simultaneously teaching the material students need for sciences, engineering, economics, and other quantitatively demanding fields,” the professors wrote. “UC has been a national leader in supporting under-resourced students to do well in mathematics. However, UC has finite resources and can help only so many students, and only when the preparation deficits they need to overcome are within reach.”

In a statement to the Los Angeles Times, a UC spokesperson said that the system “will continue to focus on strengthening instruction, collaboration and support” for math readiness. Ahmet Palazoglu, chair of the systemwide Academic Senate, also told the Times in a statement that he has heard “concerns raised by UC faculty about student preparedness for undergraduate study,” and he has called on the system admissions board to address “timely topics tied to students’ college readiness and UC’s admission process.”

The UC Academic Senate’s Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools is scheduled to meet June 5.

 
The SF Chronicle offers a more detailed response from UC regarding the UC faculty letter, including comments from the chair of UC's Academic Senate.

[Excerpts]

...a coalition led by UC Berkeley math professors argues that abandoning the admissions test requirement has created “preparation gaps so severe that instructors must reteach middle-school mathematics” while also trying to teach college-level math.

“UC is increasingly unable to provide its students with the education needed to become leaders in California’s scientific, technological, and economic future,” warned more than 800 math and science professors from UC campuses up and down the state. “We are already seeing the warning signs.”

Asked to comment on the faculty’s letter, UC officials referred the request to UC’s top faculty leader, Ahmet Palazoglu, a chemical engineering professor at UC Davis who chairs the university system’s Academic Senate.

Palazoglu said in a statement that he was aware of the faculty’s concerns about students’ skills and in March asked the UC system’s Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools to look into the problem. Known as “BOARS,” the influential panel of professors, students and administrators oversees undergraduate admissions and makes recommendations to the regents.

“In light of concerns raised by UC faculty about student preparedness for undergraduate study,” Palazoglu said, he asked BOARS to consider the issue of “students’ college readiness and UC’s admission process.”

He said the panel will propose a “roadmap of policy work” over the next academic year “and beyond."

That suggests it could be a long time before high school students who want to attend UC have to worry about taking the SAT or the ACT exams.

In their letter urging a return to the tests, however, the faculty conveyed a sense of urgency. They talked about a “widening spread between underprepared and well-prepared students” — which they indicated could be repaired by bringing back the entrance exams — and said that the disparity is “making it harder to teach at the level required for advanced STEM work.”

The letter frames standardized tests as an external check of students’ preparation for college-level coursework. The professors warn that “severe grade inflation and essays” at the high school level make other application metrics less reliable, calling for score requirements to be reinstated as early as the 2027 application cycle.

UC spokesperson Rachel Zaentz indicated, however, that the lack of an entrance exam alone was not the cause of the plunging levels of math skills.

“Early math preparation is a national challenge, one made more difficult with shifts to emergency remote instruction in the pandemic,” she said.

 
The Washington Post editorial board has chimed in on the SAT/ACT UC issue with a stance supporting the reinstatement of testing requirements at UC. This continues a pro-testing stance the paper has held for the last 7 years or so, despite the test-skeptical articles by WaPo education journalist Valerie Strauss.

[Excerpts]

One target of the social justice movement of the last decade was standardized testing. Because average scores on tests such as the SAT vary among race and income groups, the thinking went, the tests must drive inequality. The coronavirus pandemic gave opponents of testing an opportunity to try out test-free college admissions, which were supposed to be more “equitable.”

Idealists hoped that eliminating tests would somehow usher in an egalitarian nirvana in higher education. That experiment has failed badly, and so will other crusades for equity based on false pretenses.

The result has been a predictably disastrous collapse in standards.

That’s the takeaway from an open letter signed by hundreds of faculty in math, science and engineering across the University of California’s campuses. The UC system eliminated its testing requirement in 2020. While some universities that dropped testing for admissions during the pandemic brought it back in recent years, the UC system has remained “test-blind.”

The professors, including 43 department chairs, want an SAT or ACT requirement restored, at least for students who intend to major in scientific and quantitative fields.

“We now observe preparation gaps so severe that instructors must reteach middle-school mathematics,” the instructors say. At the University of California at San Diego, for example, “in the last five years, the number of students whose mathematics skills fall below high school level increased nearly thirtyfold.”

The explosion in underprepared students makes math and science courses harder to teach. Without a testing screen, the professors say too many students lack the baseline level of knowledge needed to keep up, and it hinders everyone in class. The consequences include “longer pathways through prerequisite material, reduced readiness for advanced coursework, and growing pressure to dilute quantitative rigor.”

The University of California system — which enrolls more than 200,000 students — educates a sizable chunk of the engineers in America’s technology capital of Silicon Valley. Hobbling its ability to teach quantitative subjects will damage the U.S. economy in the long run, even if it’s hard to measure directly.

That’s a high price to pay for a superficial sense of justice. As the professors note: “The SAT/ACT mathematics requirement is not an obstacle to equity; rather, it is a prerequisite for it. Failing to measure preparation gaps does not remove barriers; it moves them into the classroom, where they become harder to overcome.”

Standardized exams are especially necessary in an “era of severe grade inflation and AI-assisted application essays,” the letter points out.

Idealists hoped that eliminating tests would somehow usher in an egalitarian nirvana in higher education. That experiment has failed badly, and so will other crusades for equity based on false pretenses.