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Updated, July 14

The University of California admissions board has voted to pull back on its original timeline to consider reinstating the SAT and ACT, according to the Los Angeles Times. The vote occurred Friday. Ahmet Palazoglu, the UC’s Academic Senate Chair, issued a statement  this week saying the proposal was not dead:  “The Academic Senate is not rescinding its commitment to a comprehensive review of standardized testing in admissions. 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.” No new timeline has been announced.

Some K-12 educators and advocates in the Golden State are skeptical of the University of California faculty’s growing campaign to bring back college entrance exams to screen out what they say are underqualified first-year students.

The idea arose in part because of incoming freshmen’s abysmal performance in math. Between 2020 and 2025, for example, the number of students at the University of California San Diego whose math skills fell short of high school standards increased nearly thirtyfold — and 70% of those students were below middle school level. 

Reading and writing has suffered mightily, too, in recent years, faculty note. The university system’s 21,000-member Academic Senate is reviewing how best to assess college readiness and will make recommendations to the UC Board of Regents in the coming months. The board is scheduled to meet today and tomorrow but the admissions test question is not on its agenda.

Critics of the proposal say reinstating the SAT and ACT will only widen the opportunity gap and would fail to address the real and solvable problems in K-12 education — particularly around teacher preparedness.

“That exam will be a gatekeeper, punishing the most under-resourced districts, schools and communities,” said Rodolfo Ornelas, whose position as STEM coordinator at Oakland Unified School District was recently eliminated because of budget cuts. “Districts like Oakland Unified serve some of our most vulnerable populations and attract teachers who are newer in their career or are on a number of emergency credentials.”

Ornelas will soon start a job at San Francisco Unified School District where he will coach new principals. He said one of the most fundamental problems with math instruction is that many educators don’t know how to teach the subject effectively.

“A lot of times, they lack that content knowledge and the confidence to even teach mathematics, so they teach it the way they learned it and so that’s where we see our kids getting shortchanged,” Ornelas said. “Or you see these districts typically prioritizing literacy without realizing math needs to be an equal partner.”  

Educators point to COVID-related learning loss, chronic absenteeism and the corrosive nature of social media as other factors that play into college students’ poor math performance. They say the university system must work closely with K-12 schools to help ensure students have the skills they need.

Andrea McChristian, national policy director for Just Equations, a California-based math equity group, said the use of the SATs and ACTs in admissions runs against the university system’s stated goals.

“Their core mission and admissions policy says that they’re supposed to be representative of the student population in the state,” she said. “So, if you’re saying that as a public institution you want to represent the diversity of student voices and student experience in the state, yet you’re putting in this screener in the admissions process — which has been shown to lessen and suppress that very diversity that you want to have within your class — then something’s not adding up there.”

McChristian wrote to the university system July 7 on behalf of Just Equations, saying such tests sideline promising students without improving math readiness.

“A return to the SAT/ACT may seem like a quick fix, but it is not a remedy to today’s math skills decline,” she wrote.

The university system stopped requiring the SAT or ACT in 2020 and then in 2021, said the tests could not be used at all in admissions as part of a settlement to a 2019 civil rights lawsuit brought by four students, six nonprofits and the Compton Unified School District. The complaint charged that the UC system knowingly created barriers to higher education for students of color and those with disabilities by relying on the SAT and the ACT.

Around the same time, Gov. Gavin Newsom expressed strong reservations about the exams, saying their use “exacerbates the inequities for underrepresented students, given that performance on these tests is highly correlated with race and parental income, and is not the best predictor for college success.” His office did not respond to requests for comments.

But those working within the nine-school, 237,000 undergraduate student university system disagree: more than 3,000 faculty members submitted letters last month imploring school leadership to bring back the tests.

The first, signed by 2,300 people, called for the admissions exams to be reinstated for incoming students applying to STEM majors.

“We now observe preparation gaps so severe that instructors must re-teach middle school mathematics while simultaneously teaching the material students need for sciences, engineering, economics, and other qualitatively demanding fields,” the STEM faculty wrote. “UC has finite resources and can only help so many students, and only when the preparation deficits they need to overcome are within reach.”

The second letter, signed by 900 faculty members in social sciences, humanities, arts, business, law, education, and other non-STEM fields, said the SAT’s and ACT’s reading and writing sections were also critically needed indicators.

The university system is also considering using the state-level Smarter Balanced exams — annual math and English tests taken by high school juniors — in admissions, but there are complicating factors with that alternative, including that not every out-of-state applicant takes the test.

Josh Godinez is an assistant high school principal in Southern California and board director for the nearly 2,000-member California Association of School Counselors.

He said he knows socioeconomic status, access to educational resources, mental health and test anxiety can all impact a student’s performance on high-stakes tests like the SAT and ACT.  But he still believes standardized tests should be a component of what he called a “holistic” admissions review, adding these exams  “provide colleges and universities with a valuable snapshot of a student’s current academic proficiency that complements transcripts, coursework, and other measures of achievement.”

The push to bring back the college entrance exams began at UC Berkeley, about eight miles north of the Oakland Unified School District. Lakisha Young, whose organization The Oakland REACH builds and delivers family-centered learning solutions in partnership with school systems, said the parents of the students who performed poorly in math at the college level surely would have wanted to know their kids were missing critical benchmarks in earlier years.

Report cards might not have revealed the depth of their problems with the subject, she said.

“Grades don’t tell the story about competence,” Young said. “If a parent looks at a report card and sees Bs and C pluses, how are they supposed to make that connection? A ‘C’ is at least average. I think a parent would be floored about that, thinking, ‘My child has been moving through the system still stuck at a 6th- or 7th-grade math level.’”

Proponents of returning the admissions tests say they are better indicators of how well students will do in college than their high school grades. They argue, too, the exams are a more equitable method of identifying high-performing students from marginal backgrounds than other, more subjective criteria, such as exceptional extracurriculars.

Liz Noone, an instructional coach who helps math teachers inside Oakland USD, is conflicted about bringing back the tests but sees some value in the move because they would allow her students — and her school — to learn how they compare to others.

“People who are in a better socioeconomic position get tutors, they do classes, they get books, they get practice, they do this and that, where our students who are from lower socioeconomic status don’t have access to all those resources and support,” she said. “So, it’s a double-edged sword.”

Dave Kung, executive director of TPSE Math, a professional organization that works to better serve students in higher education mathematics, said the original decision to pull the entrance tests was based on an observed inequality — but was not a solution to the underlying problem.

“We saw an injustice — big equity gaps on SATs, especially for students of color — and tried to act like that wasn’t the result of deeper issues: poverty, generational wealth, the echoes of educational exclusion,” he said. “Instead, we thought ignoring it might make it go away, or at least diminish the problem. That was clearly overly optimistic thinking.”