Inside Higher Ed reports on a decision by the UC Board of Regents to accelerate its schedule to consider reinstating an SAT/ACT requirement for admission.

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Following an open letter that garnered over 3,000 faculty signatures, a New York Times editorial and nationwide discourse on the value of standardized tests, the University of California has expedited the timeline to determine whether the system should reinstate test requirements in admissions.

At a UC Board of Regents meeting Tuesday, Chair Maria Anguiano said she expects the Academic Senate to submit recommendations no later than the end of the upcoming academic year, by June 2027. The board, which wields the final authority, can then vote on whether to require applicants to submit standardized-test scores.

The board originally intended for the Academic Senate to provide recommendations in fall 2027, with any modifications to the admissions policies to be implemented for students applying in fall 2028. But on Monday, the Academic Senate chair said the group was “revising its timeline while ensuring the forthcoming review is thorough, evidence-based and informed by faculty expertise.”

The decision to move up the timeline reflects mounting urgency regarding the issue.

The 3,000 faculty signatories to the open letter argue that restoring the tests would weed out students who aren’t prepared for UC’s coursework. Opponents believe that scores don’t paint the whole picture of how students fare in college. The COVID-19 pandemic spurred most U.S. institutions to adopt test-optional policies, though some highly selective institutions—including most of the Ivy League—have since restored test requirements.

The UC Board of Regents voted unanimously in 2020 to remove the requirement for applicants—as many institutions did—giving students the choice whether to submit their scores. At the time, the regents sidestepped the Academic Senate’s recommendation to keep the test requirement.

Last month, UC’s Board of Admissions and Relations With Schools said it would launch a review of both SAT/ACT in admissions and the high school classes that students must take to be eligible for acceptance to a UC campus.

At the regents’ meeting Tuesday, Anguiano said recent public conversations have “too narrowly” focused on admissions and standardized testing. “As stewards of this institution, we need to ask a broader and more consequential set of questions: What knowledge, skills and experiences best prepare students for success at UC and beyond?” she said.

Citing “redefining college readiness” as a key priority for the upcoming year, Anguiano presented a revised timeline for the Academic Senate to review standardized tests.

“The goal of this review is not to rehash old questions or data, but an opportunity to take a fresh look at how we define and evaluate college readiness in a rapidly changing world,” she said.

 
The San Francisco Standard has additional information and opinion regarding SAT/ACT developments at UC.

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For more than two decades, UC Berkeley geography professor Nathan Sayre has offered a curriculum meant to return students’ grades in a bell curve: the majority in the B and C range, with outliers on either side.

But since 2020, he’s noticed that some students struggle to keep up with his coursework. He adjusted the difficulty of the class in response, but the results have been disturbing. Some students fly through the simplified course, while others continue to fail assignments and bomb exams.

“Exam grades in my courses have changed from a bell curve to a U-shape,” he said.

Sayre thinks standardized testing — or rather, prohibiting their use in admissions — is partly to blame. Like thousands of STEM professors at the university system, he has signed a petition to bring back testing as soon as possible.

The petition argues that too many students lack basic reading comprehension or can’t do middle-school math.

At one point, UC considered developing its own standardized test, but that plan was scrapped as unfeasible.

This week, faculty members urged the UC Board of Regents to speed up the timeline for reinstating the SAT/ACT requirement by September of this year. Instead, UC Regents Chair Maria Anguiano said an official recommendation on whether or not to reinstate the tests would come by June 2027, moving up the previous timeline by just a few months.

Days before, the UC admissions board announced that it was scrapping a plan to develop working groups on the testing requirement and report findings to the regents by fall 2027.

“A thorough review of our own admissions policies and standards is overdue,” said Ahmet Palazoglu, chair of the UC Academic Senate, a governing body that includes the admissions board and is leading the review of the requirement. “Our processes may be perceived by some as slow, but they will be deliberative and inclusive.”

But testing proponents argue the lengthy review itself is a problem. Students typically begin taking the SAT or ACT about eight months before applying to college and may start preparing even earlier, meaning any regents decision won’t affect applicants for years. Under the original timeline, the changes would have applied to students seeking admission in 2029; it’s unclear whether the revised schedule changes that.

At the UC schools, the issue has drawn battle lines between the administration, faculty departments, and students.

Proponents of the current system say the SAT and ACT present obstacles for first-generation and minority students, and scrapping them can promote diversity — critical for a system prohibited from applying affirmative action in admissions.

But those who support bringing back the testing requirements say the current system is letting students into classes they’re not prepared for, harming both them and their classmates.

One point has broad agreement: Freshmen scores on exams and in classes, particularly in math, have dropped dramatically since 2020.

But there’s far less agreement on why. Some point to the pandemic, AI, admissions policies, or some combination of the three. The debate goes to the core of UC’s mission: Should it be a system of elite institutions built to train experts or an accessible social elevator for a broad swath of Californians?

First-year retention rates and four-year graduation rates are at an all-time high across the universities. Graduation rates are up 6% since 2018, according to Pam Brown, vice president for institutional research and academic planning for the universities.

Pradeep Sen, a professor in computer and electrical engineering at UC Santa Barbara, said he’s noticed “a sharp decline” in performance since 2022, which has led him to spend more time teaching what he previously expected students to have learned in high school.

“When you have such high variance in a class, it becomes really hard to teach. Who do you teach for?” he asked.

With classrooms already grappling with shorter attention spans, pandemic learning loss and AI, Sen said delaying a decision only adds to the challenge.

“The timing of this could not be worse, because it’s pouring more fuel on the fire,” Sen said.

STEM faculty who spoke at the regents meeting were mainly on the side of reinstating the test. Those arguing against it were largely with educational organizations or nonprofits.

 
EdSource has published an article by a professor emerita at UCLA who argues that UC should not reinstate its former SAT/ACT mandate.

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It is with sadness and dismay that I see UC faculty support of the SAT resurging as a cure for all ills afflicting higher education. Citing concerns over student readiness, some faculty members have called for the reinstatement of the SAT or ACT as a requirement for UC admission. This week, the chair of the University of California Board of Regents said she expects faculty leaders to issue a recommendation by June 2027 on whether the system should restore the testing requirement.

I and many others would strongly argue they should not.

I was a member of the faculty committee, known as the Standardized Testing Task Force (STTF), that was charged in 2019 with reviewing the University of California’s policy on the use of the SAT/ACT in admissions. I was also a member of the group of six that was charged with writing the first draft of the final report for this committee.

The report we submitted at the beginning of 2020 was characterized as recommending that the test continue to be used in admissions, at least until a better test could be developed. However, that was somewhat misleading.

There was strong disagreement among the committee members about the use of the test. Roughly half of the committee argued that the test was the best predictor of college performance, and therefore should be retained. Others, including Saul Geiser with the Center for Studies in Higher Education at UC Berkeley, argued that the statistical models upon which this finding rests are flawed.

Some members contended that the test was biased against some groups of students and that using test scores in admissions was a misuse of the test because it assumed the relationship between test scores and later grades was immutable. Several people agreed to continued use of the SAT based on the premise that UC would replace it with a less-biased UC-developed test as quickly as possible, which obviously has not happened.

The reality is that students from higher-income backgrounds and stronger schools outperform those students from lower-income and African American and Latino backgrounds on the test. It is also a fact that students from more economically advantaged communities attend schools that provide stronger instruction with better prepared and more experienced teachers.

The evidence shows that students from disadvantaged backgrounds are less likely to apply to UC if they must take the test. When UC eliminated the use of the SAT/ACT in admissions, more students from groups that typically declined to apply (low income, Black and Hispanic) did so, gaining access to a critically important academic resource that will have consequences for the rest of their lives.

Countless students who take themselves out of the running for fear of the test will miss out on the opportunities a UC education can provide.

It is appalling that SAT supporters are content to deny opportunities to those student groups identified as not performing as well as others, rather than address their instructional needs. While some UC students may have weak backgrounds in mathematics, these students have met a high bar in other areas of academic accomplishment to have been admitted to the university in an extremely competitive admissions process.

Most students who have been admitted without test scores are doing fine. The students who are failing to meet the requirements of STEM courses have demonstrated that they are interested in pursuing math instruction by enrolling in these courses. The faculty can choose to reject them or to find ways to meet their needs.

Meeting these students’ needs, however, would require the use of a different kind of test — one that identifies the specific skills and knowledge needed to be successful in specific STEM areas of study. Students could then choose to take supplemental courses designed to fill in the learning gaps or opt out of a STEM major. The SAT does not allow or provide for such instructional specificity.

Reinstatement of the SAT/ACT at the UC would simply reinforce the deep inequality that exists in our educational system, no doubt resulting in proportionately fewer low-income, Black and Hispanic students gaining admission. Backtracking on the testing requirement also potentially opens the doors to further attacks by the federal administration against UC for its commitment to diversity.

 
Slate offers an interesting article by a teacher which examines deleterious educational practices brought about by the COVID era (including lesser demands on students, and increasing student use of AI), and the impact of these issues on standardized testing policies. The author describes an incident at Brown University in which a large class of economics undergraduates achieved an average score of 96 on their take-home midterm exam (which the professor suspected was due to AI assistance), but only an average grade of 49 on an in-class final exam (without AI usage).

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...COVID-era students of all ages became used to extended or nonexistent deadlines, unsecured assessments, assignment exemptions, and inflated grades. Colleges now have to reckon with the aftereffects of the COVID era—including well-meaning academic modifications that have become the new normal. To make matters worse, educators are muddling through recently established A.I. policies and unfettered student usage of the technology.

The testing debate is about to converge with these on-campus realities. Already hampered with budgets cuts and bloated class sizes, professors will now regularly be tasked with remedial instruction in all subject areas, not merely in unique situations. Without standardized testing as a reasonable barometer of student skill, colleges will be flooded with students of unknown abilities. American higher education might not be able to withstand such a crisis.

When universities paused the usage of standardized testing in their applications, they had reasonable intentions: to address historical inequities in college admissions. We should always be looking for ways to expand equity and lessen systemic exclusions, but we should not achieve these goals at the expense of rigor and integrity—for in doing so, we demean the same people whom we purport to help.

In a similar vein, tech companies promise that A.I. will save students time, eliminate unnecessary assignments, and produce instant (and personalized) feedback. Such a vision of education is unrealistic and, frankly, inhuman. Although it might sound quaint, school is for learning, which is a complex, individual process full of discovery and failure. A.I. produces outcomes, but actual learning happens when students are engaged in processes: the research and thinking that occurs during the planning and drafting of an essay; the steps involved in mathematical and scientific equations; and experiential learning, in which students make claims and hypotheses, then test them through building, designing, and creating.

And it’s only going to get worse. By removing standardized testing from the admissions process, colleges have put themselves in a bind. High school grading standards are so atomized as to render comparisons between schools nearly impossible. College administrators are also realizing that by pushing A.I. integration without sufficient input from faculty, they’ve created diplomas of tenuous worth. The only way forward is to recognize that we need a more skeptical approach toward A.I. in education, along with a return to standardized testing as one of the ways that we assess learning and applicants.

During this upcoming academic year, the students who were freshmen in high school during the nascent time of ChatGPT will apply to college. For many of them, A.I. has gone from novelty to necessity. Rightly so, they will soon need to demonstrate their abilities against established standards, on tests and in classrooms. They—and we—are in for a rude academic awakening.

 
The Harvard Gazette takes a look at the history and current status of the SAT on its 100th anniversary. Harvard was instrumental in the popularization of the exam, as it was an early adopter of the SAT to identify worthy scholarship recipients, and as it joined Yale and Princeton in late 1941 in discontinuing the classic College Board tests in favor of the SAT.

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The SAT turned 100 this summer. The dreaded rite for high school students has changed several times since its debut in 1926, but Harvard was there from the start, trying to shape it into a reliable tool to gauge college applicants’ academic readiness.

The test is the best-known product of the College Board — a nonprofit organization formed in 1899 to standardize college admissions. Then-Harvard President Charles W. Eliot was a founding member.

“The 100th birthday … it’s a question of whether you measure it from when the seed was planted to when it sprouted to when it became the giant tree that it is today,” said Andrew Ho, the Charles William Eliot Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Ho is a psychometrician whose research aims to improve the design, use, and interpretation of test scores in educational policy and practice.

“In 1926 it was just a little test,” he said. “To me, as someone who does work in testing, it’s always about who uses the test for what purpose, and that’s really where James Bryant Conant and Henry Chauncey come in.”

Conant, Harvard’s president from the early 1930s through the 1950s, and assistant dean and scholarship director Chauncy were early boosters of the test. In 1934, Chauncey pitched the SAT to Conant as a way to find qualified scholarship students. Harvard began using the test for scholarship students in 1934 and, in 1941, began requiring it for all applicants.

“James Bryant Conant saw this opportunity to take it nationwide beyond just the boys in the prep schools — to look for talent throughout the United States,” Ho said.

The most significant change to structure and scoring prior to the 21st century was the 1995 score “recentering” during which the College Board shifted the tabulation of raw scores to make them more reflective of student averages as the test grew in scale. This was also the first year the test included open-ended math questions instead of multiple choice in an effort to promote problem-solving over guesswork.

Over the last few decades, the SAT has become much more accommodating of open-ended responses, Ho said, and technology, including scannable text, has made it easier and more efficient to ask new kinds of questions such as short answers, or essays.

Data gathered by the Harvard-based nonprofit Opportunity Insights found that children of the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans were 13 times likelier than the children of low-income families to score 1300 or higher on SAT or the alternative ACT tests, while the College Board’s publicly available data shows racial inequity.

In recent years, some schools became test-optional in their admissions practices. Harvard was test-optional throughout much of the COVID pandemic, reversing the decision in 2024. College administrators argued that the SAT is just one piece of the admissions puzzle, citing Opportunity Insights research that found, despite socioeconomic score disparities, the exam is a key tool for identifying promising students at less-resourced high schools.

“The data reveal that other measures — recommendation letters, extracurriculars, essays — are even more prone to such biases,” said Raj Chetty, the William A. Ackman Professor of Public Economics and director of Opportunity Insights. “Considering standardized test scores is likely to make the admissions process at Harvard more meritocratic while increasing socioeconomic diversity.”

Ho agrees with this assessment.

“For the vast majority of high school students in the United States, these tests already exist,” Ho said. “Those test scores already exist. Asking not to see them creates more inequality than it eliminates. Covering your eyes or asking others to figure out whether they should close our eyes for us, that creates this unnecessary dilemma.”

Ho calls the set of criteria that admissions officers look at — GPA, extracurriculars, essays, and recommendations, in addition to the SAT or ACT test — the “five-legged stool.”

“If you take a leg of the five-legged stool away, it rests on these four other legs, and we should look at those four other legs critically, think about their fairness, the equality of access to those educational opportunities to write good essays, to find good letters of recommendation, to be connected to good extracurricular activities, and to have good high school grades,” he said. “Those are also often restricted along lines of class and race and gender in ways that we have to be critical of and try to remedy as well.”

The most important thing to remember on the SAT’s 100th birthday is that the test is not the be-all and end-all of a student’s capabilities, Ho said.

“People who are at selective institutions should do more to demystify, clarify, and explain how test scores function in our system as one of multiple measures,” he said. “It’s a reflection of educational opportunity at a given point in time. That’s all.”