The editorial board of The New York Times calls upon the University of California system to return to requiring SAT/ACT scores in an editorial titled " A Great University Undermines its Mission":

[Excerpts]

Seven years ago, the University of California system appointed an 18-member committee to study the use of standardized tests in its undergraduate admissions. The committee included professors from all 10 campuses and a range of disciplines. They spent a year studying the issue and published a 225-page report full of evidence and recommendations.

The committee concluded that scores on the SAT and ACT, the main standardized tests for college admissions, did a better job measuring student readiness for college than high school grades. High test scores were particularly good at finding talented students from low-income families and underrepresented minority groups. For these reasons, the committee recommended the system continue to require applicants to submit SAT or ACT scores.

The university’s leaders disregarded the report.

A few months after its release, early in the Covid-19 pandemic, the system’s Board of Regents voted to stop using the tests in undergraduate admissions. Initially, the university planned to make the submission of SAT and ACT scores optional, as many other colleges did during the pandemic. Almost immediately, though, the University of California began refusing to accept SAT or ACT scores, even from students who wanted to submit them. The policy was known as “test blind.” University leaders wrongly claimed that it would make admissions fairer and more equitable.

The results have been terrible. At the University of California, San Diego, a faculty group last year reported “a steep decline in the academic preparation” among entering students. Last fall, for example, nearly 12 percent of first-year U.C.S.D. undergraduates were not qualified to take pre-calculus, a low-level class, up from only 0.5 percent in 2020. “The key problem is that many of the students coming in do not know algebra,” said Mina Aganagic, a Berkeley physics professor. More than half of entering Berkeley students who took a math placement test incorrectly answered basic questions (such as solving for x in x²> 4).

Reading and writing skills have also deteriorated, and professors say they must spend time teaching elementary skills. “After the SAT was dropped, I got students who could not write a sentence,” said Janet Sorensen, an English professor at Berkeley.

There have obviously been several recent worrisome education trends, including smartphone distraction, artificial intelligence cheating and Covid school closures. Yet the declines in preparedness among University of California students are larger than the regression elsewhere, which underscores the role of the test-blind policy. California’s top public universities have essentially randomized aspects of the admissions process, admitting unprepared students while rejecting many who could thrive there. The change has damaged the university’s mission of fostering social mobility and training the next generation of scholars. Some of the world’s greatest research institutions must increasingly focus on remediation.

So far, the university’s leaders are ignoring the faculty’s plea for urgency. They instead plan to appoint a new committee to study the issue over the next year, saying they need more time to understand the data. This delay could lock in the current policy until 2029 because students tend to take the SAT and ACT during junior year of high school.

The university’s trustees, known as the regents, have the final word. When they next meet, on July 14, they should have the courage to admit they made a mistake six years ago and reverse it.

Even Janet Napolitano, who was the university president in 2020 and recommended a test-blind policy then, now favors its reversal. “It was a worthwhile experiment,” she told us, “but as the results come in, it is increasingly clear that the experiment needs to be revisited.”

The gaps in test scores accurately describe unacceptable inequities in American society. This editorial board has frequently argued for ambitious policies to address these problems, including a more progressive tax code, better K-12 schools, expanded preschool and measures to reverse racial discrimination. But to throw out the SAT and ACT because they show demographic gaps is akin to canceling the government’s publication of the unemployment rate because it shows similar gaps. Trying to deny a problem rarely helps solve it. The University of California is now rejecting students who would excel there, including low-income and minority students, and accepting growing numbers of students who flail.

Tellingly, when the university system announced in 2020 that it was going test-blind, it also vowed to develop an alternative test that would be “fair,” “useful” and “reliable.” The system has since abandoned the effort as “not feasible.” The reversal is a sign of the obvious: Any fair, reliable test would have results resembling those of the SAT and ACT.

Elsewhere, many other selective colleges remain test-optional, while a growing number have restored a test mandate. As Christina Paxson, the president of Brown, has written, “Standardized test scores are a much better predictor of academic success than high school grades.”

These colleges use the tests as one factor among many and, appropriately, do not tend to expect students from less advantaged backgrounds to score as highly as others. Administrators say the test scores are especially useful at identifying strong students from low-income communities. When a such a student receives even a pretty good score, it can be a sign of high potential. The University of California has chosen to be willfully blind to that potential.

Under the test-blind policy, more students are immediately thrown into classes for which they are unprepared.

When the university’s regents adopted the test-blind policy in 2020, some understood that they were choosing not to follow the science. On social media recently, Jelani Nelson, a former chair of electrical engineering and computer sciences at Berkeley, published video clips from the decisive 2020 meeting, at which several regents said they were uncomfortable rejecting the evidence. “I am a believer in data and science,” one said. Another said: “Facts matter. And data does matter.” Ultimately, though, they deferred to their colleagues who wanted to ignore test results. As Professor Nelson wrote, “They succumbed to the fad of the moment.”

When the regents meet this month, they will face a choice. They can acknowledge their error and restore the test requirement, or they can adopt a classic bureaucratic dodge and appoint yet another committee to study a problem that has an evident answer.

 
The San Francisco Chronicle reports that the University of California has rescinded its planned timeline to consider requiring SAT/ACT scores for admission.

[Excerpts]

The University of California’s timeline for considering a return of the SAT and ACT exam requirement for applicants is suddenly in flux after the faculty board of admissions quietly rescinded its two-year “roadmap” Friday, just ahead of the UC regents meeting in San Francisco this week.

The Academic Senate’s influential Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools recently laid out a detailed timeline for UC to consider the controversial question of whether to resume requiring standardized test scores. After the Chronicle reported Monday on the surprise rescinding of the BOARS plan, the Academic Senate chair responded that the university still intends to consider the question.

“The Academic Senate is not rescinding its commitment to a comprehensive review of standardized testing in admissions,” said Ahmet Palazoglu, UC’s Academic Senate chair. “Recognizing the significance of this issue, the Academic Senate is revising its timeline while ensuring the forthcoming review is thorough, evidence-based and informed by faculty expertise.”

Whether the tests help or hurt the university and its students is the subject of fierce debate that has drawn national attention after more than 3,000 professors across the state petitioned university leaders in May to reinstate the admission exams they abandoned during the COVID-19 pandemic. In June the university said it would consider doing so. The student government opposes restoring the tests, arguing that they favor wealthier applicants and limit access to UC for those from low-income families.

The controversy has loomed over the regents’ meeting, scheduled for Tuesday and Wednesday – though the board won’t vote on the testing issue. That decision had been expected to take at least a year and a half under the BOARS plan.

On June 5 BOARS adopted a timeline calling for two faculty-led groups to study whether to recommend that the tests be restored – and whether the overall academic requirements to qualify for UC admission were sufficient. Ultimately, UC’s president, James Milliken, would have decided whether to recommend that the regents adopt the groups’ findings. If so, the regents were likely to have voted in early 2028.

Yet the roadmap had few supporters. Those who want to restore the tests said the timeline took far too long. Test critics preferred the status quo.

The roadmap had appeared prominently on the BOARS website. “It disappeared this morning, or maybe yesterday,” said Michael Stryker, emeritus professor of physiology at UCSF and BOARS member.

It was unclear why BOARS rescinded the plan. Stryker, who agrees with thousands of faculty members who have been urging the regents to reinstate the admissions tests they suspended during the pandemic, said he could not discuss the board’s deliberations or reveal the vote count. But the decision was not unanimous, he said.

The timing and shape of UC’s review remain unclear. One possibility is that the regents could vote far sooner than 2028 on whether to bring back the admissions tests, said Stryker, who has served on the 12-member board for two years, his second stint on the panel.

“This frees the Academic Senate and the regents to act on a different schedule from what was” in the Roadmap for First-Year Undergraduate Admissions, as the timeline was called, said Stryker.

Regardless of the latest action by BOARS, the regents cannot vote on whether to restore the exams at this week’s meeting. All decisions require at least 10 days’ notice to the public under the state’s Bagley-Keene open meetings law.

The stakes in the debate are high: More than 200,000 high school students vied for a seat at UC last year, a record number of applicants that extended a surge in applications that began in 2021 after UC dropped the testing requirement.

 
More information about the action by UC BOARS is provided by the LA Times.

 
An LA Times columnist is skeptical of reinstating SAT/ACT requirements at UC in response to freshman math preparedness issues and the UC faculty open letter.

[Excerpts]

The University of California Board of Regents is being asked to consider whether to bring back the SAT and ACT for admissions, a debate so hot even New York is weighing in on this Golden State dilemma.

Despite dire warnings from our right-coast friends and thousands (yes, thousands) of professors who claim incoming students lack necessary skills, I’m here to present a somewhat contrarian position, based on reality, common sense and one key fact that keeps getting shuffled to the side: California parents pay taxes so their California kids can attend these excellent schools, even if they can’t do advanced calculus.

UC is not Harvard, and was never meant to embody that type of self-perpetuating exclusivity disguised as a meritocracy. As the parent of two (hopefully) college-bound teens, I understand the resentment toward both the UC admission process and the post-pandemic, artificial intelligence mess that plagues our K-12 schools.

Here’s the common sense: This isn’t a problem of scamming students or lazy teachers, though of course both exist. This is a problem with high schools, and the lingering effects of the pandemic. Bringing back a test solves neither.

“For sure, these are systemic structural problems and inequalities,” Michal Kurlaender, the chancellor’s leadership professor of education policy at UC Davis, told me.

Then why am I against returning to these tests? Because the part of that report we are ignoring is that it also found that the University of California can do better than the SAT or the ACT. Saul Geiser, a UC Berkeley researcher and a top expert on this issue, says the task force report was flawed because it failed to account for factors including family income and parent education. He calls the SAT “antithetical” to the mission of UCs and says that it is an “illusion” to think bringing them back would do anything but hurt diversity.

“Unlike private Ivy League colleges, public universities must strive to serve all sectors of the state and all segments of the population,” he told me. “The SAT, with its strong correlation with inherited privilege, is a major barrier to achieving that mission.”

The task force originally suggested that California create its own, alternative test by 2025 that would go beyond math and English to measure the persistence, resilience and determination that have always been the markers of success, in college and in life.

The pandemic and costs killed off that project, but our new era of AI has made it more possible than ever. Li Cai, a UCLA professor who was on the task force and who serves as the director of the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing, told me that he supports bringing back standardized testing and that the test-blind decision process is a “failed” experiment — even though he voted for it six years ago.

But he also still supports a test designed by the UC system for the UC system — a test that could be free, available to take anytime at your school or local library as many times as you want, and that gives continuous feedback so students can better see their weaknesses and prepare.

“My vision has not really changed very much,” Cai told me. “A public university, a prominent one like the UC ... has almost an obligation to not let the private sector take the charge in terms of intellectual leadership.”

On top of that hesitancy about the real effects of returning to the SAT is the fact that not all UC professors agree it is impossible for lacking students to catch up. Björn Birnir is the chair of the Mathematics department at UC Santa Barbara, and one of only two math chairs in the system who did not sign the open letter.

He told me that Santa Barbara sees the same deficiencies in math, especially in non-math majors, but it has found an effective way to deal with it that doesn’t involve slashing admissions based on test scores.

When students don’t have the basic skills, they are sent to the nearby community college, often over the summer, to catch up. They usually come back, he said, ready for the rigor he expects.

“These problems, they have to be addressed, but you don’t address them by reinstating the SAT,” Birnir said. “Just shutting the door is not really the best solution. We think the best way is to have a path for these students to make up deficiencies.”

Problem solved.

Bringing back the SAT may satisfy frustrated professors and parents, but it is a test that can never contend with the complicated reality of our state universities: We want them to be both world-class and a pathway for our imperfect, still-recovering kids to achieve their dreams, even if it involves summer school.

 
UC Berkeley's newspaper The Daily Californian offers an interesting take on the recently-reported student preparedness shortfalls titled "SAT misses the point: Tech, not admissions, drives student underpreparedness."

[Excerpts]

The university is in turmoil.

Last month, UC faculty made national headlines as more than 2,000 faculty members across various disciplines signed open letters calling for the reinstatement of standardized testing in UC admissions.

They allege that the removal of standardized testing has led to declining student preparedness across the university. Other SAT advocates claim that no admissions metric is free of class influence and that, relative to “soft” metrics such as extracurriculars, the test provides a more concrete measure of “academic preparation.”

In its specificity, this discourse obscures a more fundamental problem with education, one which the reinstatement of a test cannot solve. New technologies have harmed student learning at both the high school and collegiate levels. To focus on the SAT, or any other singular admissions criterion, misses the point: Student achievement will continue to decline as long as more fundamental barriers to student success persist.

Educators, students and parents have yet to fully reckon with the impact that social media, alongside other addictive new technologies, has had on education both inside and outside the classroom. Phones in classrooms are linked to worse educational outcomes, shortening attention spans and worsening mental health.

Outside the classroom, students are reading less than ever, instead spending their time on the cheap, quick entertainment offered by online platforms. It is little wonder that students are falling short of the standards set by their pre-social media peers.

Artificial intelligence models — particularly large language models, or LLMs — threaten to deteriorate student learning even more quickly. Already, freshman-level computer science classes have seen failure rates skyrocket by up to 500%, which professors attribute to the increased use of AI in the classroom. Increasingly, students are able to delegate the most fundamental and rewarding parts of learning, such as homework and reading, to AI, bypassing the fundamental processes necessary to master core concepts.

At the high school level, this is much more concerning. Already, undergraduates are using AI to cheat their way through college classes, failing to substantively engage with the material they’re taught. How can we reasonably expect high school students — who can use LLMs to cheat on their geometry homework or write their 9th-grade English essay — to walk onto their university campuses prepared?

This is not a UC issue; this is a nationwide issue that the UC system is attempting to free itself from with the SAT. Changing its admissions criteria may, in the short term, provide the university with better-prepared students. However, the Editorial Board is dismayed to see the university utilize admissions reform as a solution to student underpreparedness while leaving structural barriers to learning largely untouched.

Reinstating the SAT rests on the fantasy that there is a large pool of perfectly prepared students unaffected by the educational disruptions of the digital age, and that the university’s only mistake has been failing to select them. This logic is at best naive and at worst threatens to reify the elitism and stratification which already affect our admissions process. The UC system should not open its golden gates exclusively to students who are able to pay for bespoke tutoring or top-of-the-line test preparation.

Further, the SAT should not be mistaken for a full measure of what college readiness ought to mean. Incentivizing students to study the formula for the arc length of a circle seems unlikely to translate into success in a data structures class. > Likewise, students who are highly proficient at identifying comma splices may not be similarly skilled at interpreting Dante.

It is rash to settle for the reinstatement of the SAT in admissions. It is a bandage solution that will deprive the university of a wide breadth of students with potential and compromise its mission as a vehicle for social and economic mobility. If the UC system truly wants to lead the way in public education, it should not be more selective in whom it chooses to admit, but should instead invest its resources in bettering its applicant pool.

 
EdSource offers an article focusing on UC's intention to formally consider using the Smarter Balanced exams in lieu of reinstating SAT/ACT requirements.

As the University of California weighs whether to reinstate the SAT in admissions, another option is also on the table: using California’s existing standardized test administered to high school juniors.

The committee charged with exploring the pros and cons of bringing back the SAT and ACT will also investigate the possibility of using Smarter Balanced exams, the annual tests given to 11th graders in California public schools to measure proficiency in math and English, as an admissions tool.

UC’s Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools (BOARS), the Academic Senate committee that oversees undergraduate admissions matters, is formally considering both options amid some faculty’s concerns that more students have entered UC unprepared for college-level math since the system stopped requiring the SAT and ACT in 2020.

Proponents of using Smarter Balanced scores argue the test is more equitable than the SAT and ACT, which critics say are biased toward affluent students.

Unlike the SAT and ACT, supporters say, the Smarter Balanced assessments are aligned with California’s public school curriculum, and measure whether students are meeting state standards in math and English. Some research also suggests that using Smarter Balanced scores in admissions could result in a more racially and socioeconomically diverse applicant pool.

“I would hope that they would at least consider it,” said Michael Kirst, the former president of California’s State Board of Education who has long advocated for using Smarter Balanced scores in UC admissions. “Why would you not look at a really strong 11th grade test that they had to take in mathematics?”

Support, however, is not universal. Some math faculty say they prefer the SAT and ACT because they test students on more advanced math topics than the Smarter Balanced exam. There is also concern that the Smarter Balanced assessment is not designed to be a high-stakes exam and that repurposing it for admissions could be problematic. And it’s not clear what it would mean for applicants from private schools and from other states.

All of that is likely to be weighed by BOARS, which is convening a faculty work group to explore the issue. The group will meet monthly beginning in October and submit a final recommendation by May 2027. The committee will consist mostly of faculty and include additional UC staff as well as a representative from the California State Board of Education.

“We want to make sure that before a major decision is made, especially around standardized testing, that we get it right,” said David Volz, chair of BOARS and a professor of environmental toxicology at UC Riverside.

‘I don’t see any reason to look at it again’

The idea to use Smarter Balanced scores as an admissions tool was introduced in 2017, when Kirst and then-State Superintendent of Instruction Tom Torlakson urged former UC President Janet Napolitano to consider integrating the exams into admissions.

After UC’s Board of Regents voted in 2020 to suspend the use of the SAT and ACT in admissions, the system’s Academic Senate created a committee to explore whether the Smarter Balanced test could be a replacement.

The committee ultimately recommended against it. A 2021 committee report concluded that the Smarter Balanced test was not designed to be a high-stakes exam and that repurposing it as one would likely lead to the same inequitable practices associated with the SAT, such as expensive third-party test preparation courses.

Mary Gauvain, a now-retired professor of psychology, co-chaired that committee. She said in an interview that she was “completely surprised” to learn that UC is reconsidering the use of Smarter Balanced scores in admissions.

“I think our findings still stand. I don’t see any reason to look at it again,” she said.

Some UC faculty were also caught off guard, including Zvezda Stankova, a UC Berkeley math professor. Stankova was among the five Berkeley professors who crafted an open letter calling on UC to reinstate the SAT and ACT as an admissions requirement for students in science, technology, engineering and math programs. That letter now has more than 2,300 signatures.

Stankova said she prefers the SAT and ACT because the exams include more Algebra II concepts than the 11th grade Smarter Balanced exam.

“I’m not saying it’s a bad test, but it does not have the sophistication of the SAT,” she said.

Volz, the BOARS chair, said he is aware of the 2021 recommendation. But he added that “the general sentiment” among the members of BOARS is that “a lot has changed” since that report was published, including the proliferation of artificial intelligence and its impact on student learning.

“We weren’t sure if we could assume that those (conclusions) were still valid,” he said.

 
Inside Higher Ed has additional insight into the recent purchase of ACT, Inc. by The Educational Testing Service.

[Excerpts]

Two years after Educational Testing Services lost its contract to administer the SAT, ETS has acquired ACT from a private equity firm.

“Every student deserves a strong education, a fair shot at college, and a path to a good job,” Amit Sevak, CEO of ETS, said Tuesday in a news release announcing the acquisition of ACT, which administers a standardized college admissions test that rivals the SAT. “Together with ACT, we’re determined to serve students and parents along with educators and states by expanding access to education and job opportunities across America.”

(ETS declined to disclose the terms of the deal to Inside Higher Ed.)

The deal is the latest move by both ETS and ACT to grow their presence in the skills-based credentialing market amid the rise of test-optional college admissions policies first put in place during the pandemic. While colleges and universities have used both the SAT and ACT to help assess an applicant’s aptitude for success for decades, during the 2026 admissions cycle fewer than 10 percent of bachelor’s degree–granting institutions required applicants to submit ACT or SAT scores.

Both tests have seen declining participation rates in the 2020s.

In 2025, only 1.38 million students took the ACT, compared to 1.78 million in 2019. That drop in demand led the ACT to lay off more than 100 employees in 2023 and sell the nonprofit to the private equity firm Nexus Capital Management the next year. At the time, Janet Godwin, then CEO of ACT, said the purchase was aimed at doubling down on assessing “college and career readiness” and reaching a wider pool of learners, job seekers and employers.

The same year that the ACT became a for-profit company, ETS — which had already executed several rounds of layoffs since 2019 — lost its contract to administer the SAT for the College Board. And while ETS still owns and administers two of the largest exams in the country—the Graduate Record Examination and the Test of English as a Foreign Language—participation for those has also been on the decline. In January, reports surfaced that ETS was looking to sell or find strategic investors for the two exams, though no deals have been publicly announced.

ETS’s acquisition of ACT this week is yet another signal that there’s growing demand for more detailed, candidate-specific assessments, said Michael Nettles, a professor of psychometrics at Morgan State University and former chair of policy evaluation and research at ETS.

“The SAT and ACT scores can be useful because they may tell us something generally about candidates,” he told Inside Higher Ed, noting that some colleges have recently rescinded their test-optional admissions policies. “But colleges, universities and employers want to know more information about candidates—their commitment to learn and how they learn—that will help make decisions in matching people with places.”

 
Further coverage of the purchase of ACT, Inc. by ETS is offered by US News and Forbes.

 
Jon Boeckenstedt (former head of Enrollment at DePaul University and Oregon State University) is skeptical that the balm for UC's recent student preparedness issues is a return to SAT/ACT mandates. He asks "What if the SAT is the Cause of Our Math Problems, Rather than the Solution to Them?"

[Excerpts]

You have probably heard that almost 1,000 faculty in the University of California system are recommending that the UCs return to requiring the SAT for admission. That’s not surprising: Berkeley, among others, adopted the SAT as a requirement because it wanted to be seen as an equal to the prestigious east-coast institutions in the 1950s who required it, and of course, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, especially in higher education. (It should be noted that ETS opened an office in Berkeley to encourage this lunacy.) The recommendation follows other august (I refuse to use the “e” word) institutions who have returned to requiring the SAT for admission, after the COVID pandemic made the test optional almost everywhere. It’s not entirely surprising.

The curious thing about the letter, though, especially coming from mathematicians and scientists who got to where they are by conducting research, is the rapid movement from problem statement to “solution.” In a nutshell, it’s “Students are struggling in math. So the problem is the admissions office. Bring back the SAT for STEM majors.” It seems like a conclusion a freshman might leap to, and it seems like overkill, given first-to-second year retention at the UCs does not appear to be affected, which would be the first place you’d expect to see serious academic deficiencies show up (we’ll have to wait a while for four-year graduation rate data to see how the first test-free class looks). It is possible, of course, that students are switching out of STEM majors into business or humanities or social sciences once they fail Calculus, but that’s hardly a new trend in higher education. It’s so common, it’s cliché. (click images to view larger).

I am not going to argue with the lived experiences of the faculty who teach mathematics in the UC System, although I do like to point out the research of Saul Geiser at Berkeley who has consistently shown big problems with the results from (and our assumptions about) the SAT in predicting performance, even before you look at issues of inequity, using the College Board’s own data. And famously, of course, Geiser responded with an “Oops, you forgot something” when the UC Faculty said tests were better predictors of performance than GPA. I do wonder, however, how this report leads anyone to think the SAT is the answer.

...a standardized test is designed to sort people, and will always have an almost perfectly shaped bell curve in the outcome because the test is made up of questions of varying levels of difficulty, based on research from prior test administrations where they are tested for validity: Lots of people end up in the middle, and fewer at the tails. Anthony Carnevale, a former executive at ETS, even admitted in the film “The Test and The Art of Thinking” that in order to design a standardized test that was effective, you had to try to trick people into choosing the wrong answer.

Elementary, secondary, and higher education in the US has turned into a sorting machine for industry, assisted by the standardized testing industry.

In fact, the whole assumption among the critics of “grade inflation” is that the purpose of secondary education is to sort students for the Highly Rejectives. Read that again, and ask yourself if that idea ever occurred to you, or if you believe it’s a valid purpose of public education.

It is my personal opinion that standardized tests are popular for college admission at the Highly Rejectives because they are in the business of rationing slots, and want to be as certain as they can that these slots are allocated to students who can take advantage of the educational environment, notwithstanding the absurdist proposition that somehow the tests are academic qualifications. The SAT and ACT have very low rates of false positives: That is, if you score a 1580 or a 35, it’s extraordinarily unlikely you lucked out. You must have something going on upstairs, even if it’s just a good test prep program. It’s also relevant to the discussion, I think, that Robert Sternberg, with degrees from Yale and Stanford that certainly suggest he was adept at standardized tests, says some faculty feel they owe something to the SAT, and their blind allegiance to it is payback.

The funniest thing in all this seems to be this news story from Berkeley. The version that’s current on the web is different than the original one, which you can read here, via the Wayback Machine of the Internet Archive.

“Yet, in 2016, campuswide data showed that a number of students starting Calculus 1 tested below entry level for the course. Some even needed refreshers on fractions and exponents,” the original said, “In 2016, the Department of Mathematics decided to assess incoming students’ readiness. They found that around 40 percent of students starting Calculus 1 tested below entry level for the course. Some even needed refreshers on fractions and exponents.” The emphasis in both is mine, and the folks at Berkeley are apparently double-checking the numbers; they could not provide a report citation for me when I checked.

But that original statistic is interesting, because, of course, in 2016 (and for at least 50 years before and several years after), the UCs required the SAT for admission. Here is a summary of the IPEDS-reported standardized test scores at Berkeley for the years in the middle of that decade, showing the 75th (orange) and 25th (blue) scores.

For those who aren’t used to looking at numbers like this, the short answer is you had to smoke the SAT math section to get into Berkeley at this time. And yet, “some number” or maybe “40 percent” of students placed into Calculus had challenges with 6th, 7th, and 8th grade math concepts. It raises several questions for me:

---Did anyone consider any other possible explanations for this current iteration of the problem? Like, I don’t know, the fact that these students were in middle school when COVID hit and everyone was learning online even though no one was prepared for it? Are experienced elementary and high school math teachers leaving the profession? Are class sizes in California getting larger? Is state funding for primary and secondary education falling? Or is the lack of the SAT just a facile, post hoc, ergo propter hoc solution?

---Why isn’t the placement test catching this, allowing students to be placed in a course they’re not ready for? Is this a matter of faculty thinking that throwing students into the deep end of the pool is good for them? The report says, but only near the end, “We see that the pool of students who did not pass Calculus I is overwhelmingly dominated by those who entered with severe deficits.” That needs some explanation and some accountability, I think: Why were students with “severe deficits” allowed to go into a class they were not ready for? Would you put these students into Differential Equations if they weren’t ready? This is really confusing.

---Why weren’t the UC System and the other Highly Rejectives telling College Board to fix the SAT? Other than the time Richard Atkinson did just that, and found out about the College Board PR Machine, I mean.

---What happened to the UC-specific test that some members of the faculty suggested during the debate about going test-free? Maybe that would be better, especially if it’s not multiple choice?

---Finally, is a multiple choice test really a good way to measure achievement in mathematics?

The challenge with math in high school and college is not new, and I don’t see that the faculty have tied these challenges to a lack of SAT scores. In fact, I think the proliferation of multiple choice math tests, and our (forced) focus on standardized tests actually cause student to think about math in ways that keep students from succeeding.

And as history shows us, even having the SAT, and only admitting students with high scores, doesn’t eliminate the challenge. It just makes the solution even more complex.

And there is nothing a mathematician loves more than an elegant solution to a complex problem.