Columbia University announced today that it will reinstate an SAT/ACT testing requirement for all students seeking to enroll in the fall of 2028. Columbia had been the only holdout among Ivy League universities to retain a pandemic-era test optional policy.

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Columbia College and Columbia Engineering are returning to required standardized testing for all first-year and transfer applicants, effective August 2027 for the 2027-2028 admissions cycle. First-year and transfer applicants seeking to enroll for Fall 2028 will need to submit either SAT or ACT scores. Applicants who face challenges in meeting this requirement may request a waiver at the time of their application. Columbia College and Columbia Engineering will remain test optional for the upcoming 2026-2027 admissions cycle.

In 2020, Columbia announced a test-optional policy on a provisional basis due to limited testing opportunities during the COVID-19 pandemic. That policy was extended in 2023 with no stated end date, accompanied by a commitment to ongoing assessment to ensure that admitted students were successful within our academic environment. Through a multi-year faculty review, it was determined that test scores, among other factors, were a useful indicator of potential student success.

Additional details about the testing policies are available on the Testing Policy web page.

 
The Atlantic has published an article receiving considerable attention, titled "Actually, the SAT Was Necessary After All."

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Zvezdelina Stankova has taught mathematics at UC Berkeley for nearly three decades. But in 2023, while teaching introductory calculus for the first time since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, she noticed that something was quite wrong. The bottom 25 percent of students were not just struggling with the coursework, Stankova told me; “people were in freefall.” Teaching was becoming impossible. “With one hand, I am teaching a complex integral, and with the other hand, I am telling them how to solve a simple linear equation like 7x – 2 = 5,” Stankova said.

Mina Aganagic, a string theorist at Berkeley who has taught calculus for 20 years, noticed something similar. “I realized that for students to follow me,” she told me, “I had to start reviewing basic algebra stuff, like fractions.” The lack of mathematical fluency, Aganagic said, extended even to “the meaning of equals in an equation.” Both professors said their students came to office hours and still tried hard to pass—often by trying to commit equations to memory when they could not understand them. But however hard they worked, most of the students who arrived to calculus class without knowing algebra failed.

Stankova and Aganagic believed they knew why the bottom had fallen out of their calculus classes—and it wasn’t just that the coronavirus had disrupted their incoming students’ high-school math classes. The entire University of California system abandoned the use of standardized tests in admissions during the pandemic and, unlike many of its peer institutions, has neither restored their use nor announced any plans to do so.

Late last month, Stankova and Aganagic, along with three other Berkeley professors, published an open letter arguing for the reinstatement of those testing requirements—at least for any students seeking science, technology, engineering, and mathematics degrees. “Basic mathematical fluency is analogous to literacy; without it, success in university-level STEM becomes structurally unattainable for students,” they wrote. Their letter came only six months after UC San Diego released a shocking report finding that one in 12 of its incoming students struggled with even middle-school math. Since the letter’s publication, more than 1,400 professors and lecturers have co-signed it.

In other words, a huge share of STEM and economics faculty across the UC system is now in open revolt—demanding that California’s public universities at least look at standardized-test scores before offering admission. The rupture was years in the making, after a policy change meant to promote equity collided with the practical realities of teaching calculus to students who struggle with basic algebra even at some of America’s premier scientific universities.

The rupture was years in the making, after a policy change meant to promote equity collided with the practical realities of teaching calculus to students who struggle with basic algebra even at some of America’s premier scientific universities.

Standardized tests are deeply entangled in the debate over affirmative action. Selective universities used race-based preferences in admissions to promote demographic diversity within their student body; these preferences were supposed to be small. But tests provided a quantitative measure for how large these preferences actually were.

Grade inflation has, after all, eroded the signaling value of a strong high-school transcript: More than 25 percent of those taking UC San Diego’s remedial math course in 2024 had a 4.0 GPA in high-school math.

 
The Los Angeles Times reports that the UC-wide Academic Senate’s Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools will formally consider reinstating standardized test for admissions to UC schools.

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Six years after dropping SAT and ACT test requirements, members of an influential University of California admissions board said Thursday that the group will reconsider requiring the standardized tests, a major move favored by faculty who have complained that many students are severely deficient in math.

The potential reversal thrusts the nation’s most prestigious public university system back into a contentious national debate over standardized testing, fairness and college readiness, and follows a wave of elite campuses — including Yale and Caltech — that have already brought the assessments back.

The move, announced by the UC-wide Academic Senate’s Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools, comes amid mounting pressure from UC faculty and outside activists over the test-free approach. More than 1,400 UC professors — many of them in math, science, technology and engineering — last month signed an open letter calling on UC to reinstate the admissions tests, setting off intense public advocacy and private lobbying of UC leaders from faculty, parents and students on different sides of the debate.

In their letter, the professors bemoaned that “we now observe preparation gaps so severe that instructors must reteach middle-school mathematics.”

The decision to revisit standardized testing ultimately rests with the UC Board of Regents. If the tests are reinstated, the change would not take effect until the fall of 2028 at the earliest.

The Academic Senate makes recommendations through its Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools to UC leaders, including President James B. Milliken and the regents. The senate said it will convene a work group to meet over the next year to look at the issue. At least 18 members will include faculty from an array of disciplines including STEM and humanities, UC admissions and enrollment experts, and a representative of the state education board.

The road map the Academic Senate released Thursday said the committee will be charged with investigating “the advantages and disadvantages” of relying on SAT/ACT scores, as well as California’s 11th grade Smarter Balanced Assessment English language arts and math scores.

Milliken said in statement that UC leadership and the regents “take very seriously the critical issue of college preparedness.” He described the senate plan as a “comprehensive, data-driven review to support its recommendations to strengthen student readiness and success at UC. There are few things more important on our agenda ... It’s important that UC gets this right.”

The UC Academic Senate chair, Ahmet Palazoglu, said in a letter that it “has become clear that academic preparedness for college is a growing challenge.”

“The widening gap in college readiness among high school graduates is not a new phenomenon but rather an ongoing issue, likely driven by many factors affecting admissions and students’ academic success across the country,” said Palazoglu, who is also a chemical engineering professor at UC Davis. He said he “strongly” supported further study of testing with a “deliberate, evidence-based” approach. He did not endorse reinstating requirements.

On the ground, college counselors say student behavior has already shifted.

“Testing continues over the last couple of years to be back on the upswing,” said Lisa Carlton, president of the Independent Educational Consultants Assn. “We are seeing most of our students, unless there’s a serious reason not to, testing and taking that more seriously.”

Carlton acknowledged concerns. “Access to test prep tutoring is an issue of equity. ... There’s a population that can afford those resources, and that isn’t everyone.”

A 2025 UC Institutional Research and Academic Planning report found that student outcomes pre- and post-SAT/ACT requirement stayed mostly stable. The study concluded that the “overall impacts” of COVID-19 and elimination of standardized testing requirements “appear limited.”

Another publication the same year, by Saul Geiser of the UC Berkeley Center for Studies in Higher Education, argued that the SAT is “a poor fit for America’s public universities.”

Geiser said 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.

 
Matt note: here is some key text from the UC Academic Senate Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools document titled "2026-2027 Policies and Partnerships Roadmap for First-Year Undergraduate Admissions":

Charge: Workgroup 1 (WG1) will consider the use of standardized tests in the first-year admissions process. Compared to UC’s current test-free policy for standardized test scores, WG1 will investigate the advantages and disadvantages of relying on SAT/ACT scores and/or 11th grade Smarter Balanced Assessment ELA/Math scores for use in the admission of first-year California resident and non-resident applicants, as these tests may have evolved since 1) the STTF’s recommendations were provided in January 2020 and 2) standardized test requirements were eliminated for the first-year cohort entering in Fall 2021. WG1 will provide recommendations about whether standardized tests should be used for admissions or not. As part of their deliberations, WG1 will consider guiding principle #5 within Section II of BOARS’ Guidelines which states that “faculty on individual campuses should be given flexibility to create admission policies and practices that, while consistent with Universitywide criteria and policies, are also sensitive to local campus values and academic priorities.”

 
The San Francisco Chronicle also examines recent developments at UC regarding a reconsideration of SAT/ACT mandates:

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The University of California said Thursday that it will consider restoring admissions exams for freshman applicants, two weeks after more than 1,000 faculty members signed an open letter expressing alarm at the poor math skills of students admitted since 2020, when UC stopped accepting the SAT and ACT standardized tests.

But UC is not expected to decide immediately on whether to reinstate the tests — a delay that some professors who signed the open letter said could be too late for the class applying in 2027.

The debate comes as dozens of universities around the country have been reinstating the SAT and ACT entrance exams they suspended during the COVID-19 pandemic, including Stanford, where students entering this fall had to submit scores for the first time in six years.
On Thursday, UC announced what could be a lengthy process for reaching any conclusion of the issue. One faculty-led panel will study whether it makes sense to bring back the admissions exams, and a second will review the quality of the academic coursework — known as the A-G requirements — that high school students must complete to qualify for UC admission.

The panels will be established by UC’s Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools, an influential group of professors, students and administrators known as BOARS that oversees undergraduate admissions.

The panels’ recommendations will then be reviewed by UC’s Academic Senate and university leaders before a final vote by the Board of Regents.

“In recent years, it has become clear that academic preparedness for college is a growing challenge,” Ahmet Palazoglu, a UC Davis chemical engineering professor and chair of the university system’s Academic Senate, wrote Thursday to the Senate’s Academic Council. “While recent faculty concerns have drawn renewed attention to these issues, BOARS’ work is designed to address these challenges in a changing educational landscape.”

Palazoglu said earlier that he had asked BOARS in March to begin looking into the problem after he became aware of faculty concerns.

UC president James Milliken said Thursday that he and the regents will hear an update on the process in July.

“There are few things more important on our agenda,” Milliken said in a statement that called the panels’ work a “comprehensive, data-driven review” supporting “student readiness and success at UC.”

“It’s important that UC gets this right,” he said.

UC Berkeley math professor Zvezdelina Stankova, an early signer of the open letter, told the Chronicle on Thursday that the BOARS timeline is far slower than what the signatories believe is needed.

The new process “initiates a new round of studies and discussions that will take considerable time and are unlikely to reach conclusions soon enough to affect entering freshmen in fall 2028,” Stankova said.

In a statement, UC pushed back on the idea that its academics might be substandard, noting that “UC has some of the highest first-year retention rates and the highest two- and four-year graduation rates in the nation for students from all educational backgrounds,” despite “pandemic-related learning loss.”

More than 1,000 colleges nationwide made the SAT and ACT admissions tests optional during the pandemic. But a court barred UC from using the tests at all through 2025, following a legal challenge from students who argued that the requirement gave an advantage to students who could afford test prep services and travel to exam sites.

That argument remains valid, UC Berkeley Law professor Jonathan Glater said this week in a Chronicle opinion piece in which he acknowledged that “there is reason to worry” about declining math and reading skills.

“But revisiting the decision to abandon the SAT is not the right response,” said Glater, who in 2020 co-chaired a committee that explored the possibility of replacing the widely used SAT with a UC-created entrance exam.

“Taking SAT scores into account favors students whose families earn more and not students who may benefit most from a UC education,” Glater wrote Wednesday, noting that SAT scores “closely track family income and that family incomes reflect discrimination and histories of exclusion.

“It’s not fair,” he said, which is essentially what the court found when it stopped UC from using admissions tests six years ago.

The California State University system voluntarily dropped the requirement in 2022.

 
Here is Jonathan Glater's San Francisco Chronicle op-ed titled "The University of California should not bring back the SAT for student admissions" mentioned in the item above.

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In the years since the University of California abandoned using the SAT to help pick which students it would accept, it has enrolled the most diverse classes in its history. UC continues to be an exceptional engine of socioeconomic mobility, admitting a much higher share of students who are poor than peer institutions, both public and private. UC students continue to go on to do amazing things, as they always have. This is good.

Despite these positive developments, calls to bring back the SAT have grown louder and include a letter signed by hundreds of my fellow UC instructors on May 28. The signatories point to alarming numbers of students who are unprepared to take college-level math classes and warn of the danger posed to institutional excellence.

“The current admissions system is undermining this structure by admitting students directly into STEM UC programs without a reliable measure of whether they are prepared to succeed,” they wrote.

There is reason to worry. Declines in math and reading skills have been developing for years, as shown by study after study, and predate the pandemic and UC’s ditching of the SAT. Colleges and universities should be pondering what to do.

But revisiting the decision to abandon the SAT is not the right response. The reasons for that decision have not changed. Bringing the SAT back would elevate one variable — that test’s scores — above other variables that matter, in the name of reducing the number of students whose math preparation is too weak.

If UC remains committed to serving as an engine of socioeconomic mobility and thus a counter to the legacies of past, unjustly created inequality, then history suggests that the SAT is not much help.

Deciding which students UC should admit is and will always be a difficult and complex question, and the answer must rest on far more than math performance. We do not make admissions decisions based solely on predictions of who will do well, and we do not regard the bottom half of every class as admitted in error. In university admissions, we pursue multiple objectives, sometimes objectives that are in tension with each other, and some objectives are more important than others.

In the years since abandoning the SAT, UC has been doing what it ought to do: admitting its most diverse classes, including more California residents. We should not reimpose requirements that will make our campuses less representative of this state.

A challenge posed by the apparent decline in math readiness is that campuses have “finite resources and can help only so many students, and only when the preparation deficits they need to overcome are within reach,” as the letter by my fellow UC instructors noted. Addressing the need for resources would benefit students and instructors; returning to the SAT would shut students out who otherwise would be on UC campuses.

 
An op-ed taking the precise opposite view (titled "Bring Back the SAT)" has been written by one of the UC math professors who signed the open letter.

None of this [the rapidly increasing number of enrolled UC students demonstrating that they are woefully underprepared for the rigorous mathematics required to pass STEM courses at UC] would be as likely if the UC system still used a standardized test benchmark. The SAT was completely abolished for UC admissions by a Board of Regents decision in 2020, driven by concerns that standardized tests disadvantage minority and low-income students. This decision went against the unanimous, data-driven recommendation of the UC faculty task force—and against many of the Board of Regents’ own stated convictions. The SAT, imperfect as it is, measures knowledge of the absolute basics and the ability to reason clearly under a time constraint. An SAT score would have told us—and Diego [one of the struggling students] himself—the truth about his preparation before it was too late.

The root cause of this bifurcation is California’s broken K-12 education. Teachers are trapped in systems that prioritize ideology over subject mastery, pressured by administrators to inflate grades, lower standards, and pass unprepared students along. The state has spent tens of billions of dollars on a high-speed rail line that has yielded zero benefit. It has spent far more, and done far worse, inflicting immense generational damage on California’s youth by failing to provide them a quality K-12 math education.

The onus for a decent math education has fallen entirely on parents. Those who can afford to move to a good school district or send their kids to after-school programs do so. Children of those who cannot are usually left trapped with subpar math instruction. Meanwhile, the schools that provide rigorous education become increasingly competitive. This is the engine behind the bifurcation we are seeing.

Take University High School in Irvine, an academic powerhouse that offers 26 Advanced Placement classes and often produces close to 50 National Merit Semifinalists a year. Its grading standards are notoriously rigorous: Nearly 100 percent of its students in AP Calculus BC pass the national exam with a perfect score of 5, yet less than 30 percent of them manage to secure an A in the classroom.

Anna was a student there. Her eyes would light up when she talked about math. She alternated between the apartments of her divorced parents, immigrants from different countries. Her father endured a punishing two-hour daily commute so that she could live near a strong public school. Anna held a 4.2 GPA, spent many hours volunteering as a peer tutor, and took five AP classes her junior year—yet she was still rejected by every UC campus to which she applied. She would have done great at Berkeley—but now she will start at a community college instead.

Remarkably, she was not bitter. “Only the geniuses get into Berkeley now,” she said. “You need a 4.4 GPA and maybe an International Science and Engineering Fair award. But I’ll be there in two years.”

Indeed, Berkeley’s admissions from University High have been slashed from 50 to 60 students per year to roughly 30.

Now look at Mission High School in San Francisco. The official state data reveals that a staggering 93.87 percent of its students failed to meet the state standards in mathematics.

Which of these two student bodies should have a higher acceptance rate to premier engineering and STEM programs in the UC system?

Common sense dictates the answer. Yet under the current rubric, the reality is exactly inverted. While fewer than 14 percent of applicants from University High were accepted to Berkeley this year, Mission High boasted a whopping 45 percent admission rate. In fact, Berkeley admitted 34 students from Mission High—twice the number of those who even met the state standards. This is a classic case of the soft bigotry of low expectations.

An analysis of official California Department of Education data reveals that this is a systemic pattern. Over the last decade, the UC system has transitioned from a positive correlation between a high school’s math and English proficiency and its admissions success to a statistically significant negative correlation. Today, the more successful a public high school is at preparing its students, the lower its graduates’ chances of getting into top UC campuses like Berkeley and San Diego.

It will take longer than it could for Anna to realize her potential, but she will be fine. Her rock-solid mathematical foundation will carry her through wherever she ends up. But we are actively harming Diego by putting him in a blistering lecture hall where he is set up for a likely devastating failure. And we are harming California by swapping their places.

It is too late to reintroduce the SAT for the 2026 cycle, but we can still help thousands of students like Diego who will apply to the UC system in 2027. That is why a growing coalition of faculty members is rushing to force an emergency course correction. If a car full of your children is hurtling toward a cliff, it is not the time to create yet another subcommittee. You’ve got to slam on the brakes. The University of California must recognize this academic emergency for what it is and act to immediately restore objective standards to the admissions process.

 
Yale News reports that the university will reinstate its former SAT, ACT requirement, after six years of having a test flexible policy.

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Following a recent recommendation from the Presidential Council on Yale College Admissions, the College returned to a pre-pandemic policy mandating SAT or ACT score submissions. The change will affect applicants to the class of 2031 and onwards.

First-year and transfer applicants to Yale College will be required to submit either their SAT or ACT scores beginning this fall.

The change, which Yale announced in a Wednesday evening press release after updating its webpage on standardized testing, reinstates a pre-pandemic mandate after six admissions cycles in which SAT and ACT score submissions were not required. Yale axed the requirement for undergraduate applicants to submit standardized test scores in 2020, then required the submission of either SAT, ACT, International Baccalaureate or Advanced Placement scores under a test-flexible policy beginning in 2024.

“Academic excellence is the foundation of the Yale College experience, and, likewise, is the core component of our admissions process,” Yale College Dean Pericles Lewis said in the press release. “SAT and ACT scores are strong predictors of a student’s future Yale academic performance, and, when considered thoughtfully as part of a whole person review, they can help identify well-prepared candidates, especially those from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds.”

The return to a test-mandatory policy follows a recommendation from the Presidential Council on Yale College Admissions, a nine-member group formed by University President Maurie McInnis in fall 2025 whose membership includes Lewis, other Yale administrators and former New York governor George Pataki ’67.

The council’s work follows previous efforts by Yale College to review its admissions processes, including after the Supreme Court ruled in 2023 that affirmative action is unlawful. The group also “considered recent executive orders and guidelines from federal agencies” in its work, according to a Yale webpage.

According to the undergraduate admissions website, 90 percent of Yale first years who enrolled last fall submitted either SAT or ACT scores. Around two-thirds of those students submitted an AP or IB score, and 61 percent submitted scores from multiple exams.

“Academic strength is the admissions committee’s first and most important consideration when evaluating candidates,” Jeremiah Quinlan ’03, the dean of undergraduate admissions, said in the press release. “This central pillar of our work has remained constant, even as our policy on tests has changed in recent years.”

The decision to reinstate mandatory SAT or ACT score submission also followed the Committee on Trust in Higher Education’s recommendation in its April report that the University clarify admissions standards. The report floated the requirement of minimum SAT scores for admission or a Yale-specific entrance exam.

The Trust Committee identified hyper-selective admissions as one of three “immediate” factors causing declining public trust in Yale and higher education.

“When selective admissions seem so inexplicable — or, worse, tilted in ways that benefit the already advantaged — it should come as no surprise that many Americans do not trust the process,” the committee’s report reads. “We recommend that the university embrace a standard of candor: It should only use criteria for admission that it is willing to describe publicly and defend openly.”

 
The Pew Research Center looks at the SAT as it reaches its 100th year.

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On June 23, 1926, about 8,000 high school students across the United States took the first Scholastic Aptitude Test, known today as the SAT. That test looked very different than the one that about 2 million high school students now take each year.

The current SAT asks students to answer 98 questions – 54 in reading and writing and 44 in math – in 134 minutes total. In 1926, the test was much faster paced, with 315 questions in just 97 minutes. Students were told they probably wouldn’t get to every question, and over the next nearly two decades, the test developers steadily made the test shorter and extended the time limits.

The content of the SAT evolved over time, too. The test was originally modeled after the Army’s IQ test and intended to evaluate students’ intelligence for admission to elite colleges. In 1994, the test developers added math questions that required students to write in their own answer rather than selecting one of several choices. The developers also got rid of questions asking students to identify the antonym of a given vocabulary word, to move away from rote memorization.

The SAT has also evolved as technology has changed. The College Board, which oversees the exam, began to allow calculators in 1994. In 2024, it moved to fully digital testing using laptops or tablets. The digital test is adaptive, which means the questions are tailored to how well each student does on an initial set of questions.

How SAT scores have changed over time

Although the format of the SAT has changed and the exact questions vary year to year, it’s possible to compare many years of SAT scores in each subject area. That’s in part because the College Board “recentered” scores in 1994 to reflect not only the changes to the test, but also the fact that many more students from varying academic backgrounds were taking the test than in the 1930s.

However, several changes in 2016 – including eliminating the penalty for wrong answers – mean that SAT scores beginning that year are not directly comparable with those from prior years.

From the 1966-67 through 2014-15 school years, the average overall SAT score fell from 1059 to 1006 out of a maximum of 1600, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics. But the average score for the reading section declined much more than the average math score did.

In 1966-67, the average reading score was 543 out of 800, and the average math score was 516 out of 800. For the next 22 years, reading scores continued to top math scores. But in 1989-90, the average math score surpassed the average reading score for the first time. After that, math scores continued to outpace reading scores every year through 2014-15. That year, the average math score was 511 (5 points lower than in 1966-1967), while the average reading score had fallen to 495 (nearly 50 points lower than in 1966-67).

After the changes in 2016, students’ scores showed a similar pattern as they had in the late 1960s and early ’70s. The scores for the new reading and writing section were slightly higher than the scores for the new math section, but both sets of scores generally fell between 2016-17 and 2022-23, the most recent school year with available data.

Standardized tests’ role in college admissions

Pew Research Center surveys have shown that many Americans support using standardized test scores for college admissions. In a December 2022 survey, 71% of U.S. adults said colleges should consider standardized test scores when deciding which students to accept. And in a March 2022 survey, 85% said standardized test scores should be either a major factor or a minor factor in college admissions.

 
The Wall Street Journal offers a short video discussion of the UC letter controversy.