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CultureCiting ‘severe’ math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM applicants
Citing ‘severe’ math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM applicants
By Jaweed Kaleem
Staff Writer
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May 27, 2026 3:31 PM PT
Hundreds of UC faculty are urging a return of SAT or ACT test requirements for STEM applicants, citing math deficits after six years of being test-free.
A UC San Diego report of soaring math unpreparedness is fueling faculty warnings that reliable testing is needed for admissions.
Critics call the SAT inequitable and say high school grades are a good predictor of college success.
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.
A landmark decision under scrutiny
UC gained national attention in May 2020 when regents unanimously voted to suspend SAT and ACT testing requirements and eliminate them entirely by 2025. Board members cited concerns the tests were biased against students of color and those from lower-income families — including students who did not have access to prep courses.
At the time, some hailed the vote as a bold and visionary move to expand access and equity.
But the vote went against the UC Academic Senate’s own Standardized Testing Task Force, which said use of test scores could actually boost admission rates for students from disadvantaged backgrounds and school districts. The report also found that test scores are a better predictor of college performance than high school grades, but that UC weighed grades more heavily in admission decisions.
Then in 2020, a California state court judge issued an injunction in a lawsuit brought by students, which forced UC to stop using the scores earlier than planned.
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, campuses across the country also suspended admissions testing requirements, including many of the nation’s most prestigious institutions. The requirement has largely resumed at elite universities.
Harvard, Brown, Dartmouth, the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford and Caltech each restored standardized testing requirements for applicants in 2024 or 2025. USC is test-optional and scores are considered as part of holistic review, but students are not penalized if they do not submit them.
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.
Ahmet Palazoglu, chair of the UC systemwide Academic Senate, said in a statement that he has heard “concerns raised by UC faculty about student preparedness for undergraduate study,” and that he has called on the system-wide admissions board to address “timely topics tied to students’ college readiness and UC’s admission process.”
The board, he said, “is in the process of proposing a roadmap of policy work and partnership building with other state and K-12 education leaders in the next academic year and beyond.”
Mounting UC concerns over math
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.
How prepared are California high school students in math?
California’s aggregate testing data complicate the picture.
Overall, in math, the state’s students are about a quarter-year in instruction behind where they were prior to the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. A quarter-year of instruction translates to about 45 school days or about nine weeks of the school year.
Statewide, 37.3% of students meet math learning standards in the grades that are tested.
In 11th grade, the most relevant grade relating to college readiness, 30.5% of students met or exceeded math learning standards. Of these, nearly half exceeded the learning standard — marking them as likely to be the best prepared for a college STEM major.
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.
Times staff writer Howard Blume contributed to this report.
Fuck the SAT, but I took the ACT for college and got a soundly "good enough" score. It doesn't punish you for wrong answers like the SAT, and I hate math, so I just filled in random answers for the math portion. I think I ended up with a score of 20 for math.
Sadly I got a higher math score than a friend of mine who actually tried to do the problems...maybe she ran out of time and didn't fill in all the answers.
Sadly I got a higher math score than a friend of mine who actually tried to do the problems...maybe she ran out of time and didn't fill in all the answers.
Watch as the next front for activists, as the pressure to reinstate the SAT grows too much, becomes subverting the SAT to make its results meaningless. Already happening with the MCAT and LSAT, won't take long here as well.
In 11th grade, the most relevant grade relating to college readiness, 30.5% of students met or exceeded math learning standards. Of these, nearly half exceeded the learning standard — marking them as likely to be the best prepared for a college STEM major.
Which is before accounting for statistics greatly massaged by the state to present the best possible picture. If even 10% of California students are meeting math standards enough to pass a linear algebra or calculus I/II class from the mid 2000s I will be seriously surprised.
Why not have incoming students at UC all take the CLEP exams in a literature subject and a mathematics subject, and use these to find where they should be placed, remedial if necessary? I expect some replies along the lines of "follow the money" but the same company that makes the SAT, PSAT, and AP tests also makes the CLEP exams.
Really if you don't have the skills for college level work the school shouldn't be allowed to make a big profit off your failure. It would be cheaper to partner with community colleges so remedial education can be done there. Universities are already partnered with community colleges in other ways, for example, there are programs where if you get an associate's degree with good enough grades you can get accepted at the university to continue onto your bachelor's degree.
Colleges shouldn't have "Admissions officers" who are essentially free from the consequences of their own decisions about who to admit and who to reject.
Teaching faculty should be appointed by lottery to be an admissions officer, and like being on a jury it gets you out of "service" for some time after. In other words, whoever admits this year's class has to spend the next four years teaching them.
Right now we fill the admissions offices with people who believe they're basically a social worker changing lives with their big envelope. They don't have to deal with the fallout of students who can't achieve the basics of what they need to do in order to graduate. This creates a scenario where the people with a stake in the achievement of the students have very little say in who actually gets in (often just one vote on a committee) while people who are full-time admissions officers typically come from backgrounds in sociology, cultural studies, and similar bullshit disciplines that place a premium on diversity quotas and don't care one whit about achievement.
Fuck the SAT, but I took the ACT for college and got a soundly "good enough" score. It doesn't punish you for wrong answers like the SAT, and I hate math, so I just filled in random answers for the math portion. I think I ended up with a score of 20 for math.
Sadly I got a higher math score than a friend of mine who actually tried to do the problems...maybe she ran out of time and didn't fill in all the answers.
IIRC, the ACT does punish for wrong answers, but to a lesser degree than the SAT.
It's been well over a decade though, so I may be wrong.
Either way, this is just more proof that shit is going to hell. This kind of stuff should be reinstated (and expanded, to include any "international students" going for a master's, because most of them just cheat like hell and never had the credentials to begin with) because this whole thing was an end run to replace whites.
Tbh, math is probably one of the least helpful ways to gauge intelligence in an era where calculators and computers are in everyones pocket. Critical thinking, language, and understanding bias should be the main focus. Wanting people who can so math like a machine is how you get universities full of jeets and Chinese people
Watch as the next front for activists, as the pressure to reinstate the SAT grows too much, becomes subverting the SAT to make its results meaningless. Already happening with the MCAT and LSAT, won't take long here as well.
I have been part of a committee that reviews "performance tasks" (test questions, that is) for a state assessment of secondary science standards. I am very concerned as none of the questions require a general understanding of scientific principles let alone any content. It's basically a reading test with some graph analysis thrown in. I am very concerned. You are right to worry that if activists can't get their way with lowering standards then they will get their tendrils of influence into the assessments themselves.
I have been fighting against the inquiry movement of instruction for a couple years now and when I point out that the PISA data shows inquiry style instruction actually harms student achievement, the people who disagree with me argue that the PISA is a poor metric. I'm so fucking tired of these games. No test is perfect, but honestly, if you can't get through the SAT you're probably a certain kind of stupid, sorry.
Back when I actually tried "differentiated instruction", I soon realized that a kid who couldn't pass the multiple choice questions couldn't write about it either, nor could they even talk about whatever it was they were supposed to learn. There never was a secret genius there that my white woman testing methods were obfuscating. Kid's just fuckin' dumb.
Tbh, math is probably one of the least helpful ways to gauge intelligence in an era where calculators and computers are in everyones pocket. Critical thinking, language, and understanding bias should be the main focus. Wanting people who can so math like a machine is how you get universities full of jeets and Chinese people
We have admission tests for colleges and they all forbid to take calculators or phones. It still happens as it was when I tried for college more than 20 years ago. They also are focused on what you're applying to. The candidates for engineering have to solve Maths (Algebra, Arithmetic, Trigonometry, Geometry) Logic, Chemistry, and Physics with higher bonuses than the other fields and vice versa. Those applying to health careers need to score high on biology. We have also a college with a three days test, the Engineering College. The test is like 80% Science and Maths and little of the rest, About 50K people apply and only 2K are accepted to each.
Tbh, math is probably one of the least helpful ways to gauge intelligence in an era where calculators and computers are in everyones pocket. Critical thinking, language, and understanding bias should be the main focus. Wanting people who can so math like a machine is how you get universities full of jeets and Chinese people
And having tools is useless if you don't know what to use them for.
Handing a man a hammer doesn't mean he knows how to assemble the frame for a wall, giving a man a calculator doesn't mean it's fine for him to design the bridge I'll be driving over... its why you need someone to double-check your work and sign off on it if you want to be an engineer.
We have admission tests for colleges and they all forbid to take calculators or phones. It still happens as it was when I tried for college more than 20 years ago. They also are focused on what you're applying to. The candidates for engineering have to solve Maths (Algebra, Arithmetic, Trigonometry, Geometry) Logic, Chemistry, and Physics with higher bonuses than the other fields and vice versa. Those applying to health careers need to score high on biology. We have also a college with a three days test, the Engineering College. The test is like 80% Science and Maths and little of the rest, About 50K people apply and only 2K are accepted to each.
I actually went into the GRE around 2011 thinking they didn't allow calculators. A practice book told me they weren't allowed.
A practice test I'd done included three questions involving square roots, so I decided to learn how to do square roots without a calculator. Every math teacher I've ever had taught me to just use a calculator, but there were tables that had it done for you before calculators were widely available. It's an iterative process, like the way pi is calculated, the more times you do it the more accurate it gets.
Turns out the whole fucking math portion was basically problems from about a 9th grade level that at worst tried to trick you with stuff like using a negative exponent in a denominator and stuff like that, maybe a little tenth grade stuff. They included a basic on-screen calculator too. I ended up with a perfect 800 on the math portion of the GRE.
A calculator is only of use if you know how to use it. We were issued scientific calculators and during trigonometry questions I was always confused about the order the variables were meant to go in. Wouldn't have fuckin' made it as a physicist or engineer with a calculator I couldn't use.
Now would you like people like me designing rockets or aircraft? Because that's what I wanted to do back in high school.
I tutor a lot of standardized tests on the side, including the ACT and SAT. Every student that comes to me is always missing a fundamental math skill, because they had a year where they were "learning online" due to covid. The first question I ask half my students is "what is 1/3 + 1/2 " and without fail 90% of the students from this year said "2/5". That's because they had covid the year they learned fractions. It's just getting worse and worse as the years go by, since th kids are missing more and more fundamental math.
