Why University of California Faculty Want the SAT and ACT Back

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The University of California Drops the SAT and ACT from Admissions

The SAT and ACT are standardized tests that US colleges have used in admissions for decades, and the University of California (UC) had required a score from applicants since 1968.

That began to change in December 2019, when a group of students, civil-rights organizations, and the Compton Unified School District sued the UC Regents in Kawika Smith v. Regents of the University of California. The plaintiffs argued that requiring the SAT and ACT discriminated against students by race, wealth, and disability.

In May 2020, the UC Board of Regents voted to phase the tests out. It did so against the recommendation of UC’s own Academic Senate Standardized Testing Task Force (STTF), a faculty group that had spent a year studying the question and recommended keeping the tests. The task force found that scores predicted college success, and, contrary to the argument in the lawsuit, that they were if anything more useful for disadvantaged students:

During the litigation, a California court ordered UC to stop using the scores entirely, and in May 2021 the two sides reached a settlement. The agreement is direct about what UC gave up:

From that point on, UC was test-blind for admissions. UC settled the case without conceding the tests were unfair, and the agreement ran only through Spring 2025, leaving open what UC would do next.

Incoming Students’ Readiness for College-Level Math Falls

The change produced the result supporters expected. More students applied. California applications to UC rose from about 99,000 in 2020 to about 117,000 in 2024. Most of that increase came in a single year, the first admissions cycle without the test.

Over the same period, faculty reported a decline in student preparation, most visibly in mathematics. A UC San Diego workgroup studied the problem and opened its November 2025 report this way:

Enrollment in the campus’s most remedial math courses rose from under 1% of the incoming class before 2021 to nearly 12%, over 900 students in 2025.

To see how far the gaps went, the math department gave those students a test built from California’s elementary and middle-school standards. Performance fell steadily the higher the grade level of the material.

As part of the report, the math department also interviewed a number of tutors who work directly with these students. Regarding how someone who had passed high-school calculus could place into remedial arithmetic, the report notes:

The effects showed up later in the degree. Students who placed into the most remedial course failed, dropped, or withdrew from later calculus classes at rates of roughly 24% to 41%, and the report noted that very few of them went on to complete an engineering degree.

UC San Diego was the most severe case, in part because it had expanded admissions from under-resourced high schools faster than other campuses. The pattern was not limited to one campus. Other UC campuses reported that the number of students unable to start in college-level pre-calculus had doubled or tripled over five years. 

At UC Berkeley, a separate faculty study found that the share of first-year calculus students entering with severe preparation gaps rose from about 18% in 2021 to 31% in 2023, close to a third of the class.

The Berkeley study sorted entering calculus students by how many of eight prerequisite topics they had mastered. In 2021 the largest group had mastered all eight; by 2023 the largest group had mastered none.

The San Diego workgroup argued that the central problem was that, without the SAT, the university had no reliable, comparable measure of whether an applicant could actually do university-level work, which is the outcome the original 2020 task force had predicted.

Over 1,350 Faculty Push to Restore the SAT and ACT for STEM Applicants

The workgroup did more than propose fixes to its own admissions process. A majority of its members called on the UC system to reconsider standardized testing outright, pointing back to the value of the tests UC no longer used:

A recent effort has gone further. In an open letter, UC mathematics and STEM faculty asked the university to require an SAT or ACT math score from applicants to STEM majors, starting with the 2027 admissions cycle. To date, over 1,350 faculty members have signed it.

The letter also addresses the original argument against testing. Where the tests were once described as a barrier to equity, the faculty argue the opposite:

While the focus of the letter is primarily on the math requirement, the underlying concern is broader. The San Diego report also flagged writing and literacy as a concern, citing a national decline, and it recommended that UC develop a better admissions measure for writing and language skills as well. For now, the push is focused on math where the evidence is clearest.

UC is not alone in reconsidering. Several universities that dropped testing during the pandemic have since reinstated it, including Brown, Yale, and MIT. MIT also reproduced UC’s own task-force analysis and concluded that high-school grades alone were not sufficient.

As of now, nothing has formally changed. UC remains test-blind. The decision now sits with the Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools (BOARS), the faculty body that advises the Regents on admissions. BOARS is expected to produce a policy roadmap by June 30, 2026. Any new requirement would still need approval from the Board of Regents, so the faculty’s hoped-for 2027 timeline may be difficult to meet, since the next application cycle opens in August 2026.