After six years of dealing with growing numbers of unprepared students in their classrooms, math and science professors at the University of California have had enough. In an open letter addressed to the UC Board of Regents, more than 800 faculty members have detailed the harm caused to their educational mission by lowered admissions standards. They demand that the SAT and ACT mathematics be required of applicants for places in STEM majors beginning with the 2027 admissions.
The professors are right, but they do not go far enough. The SAT and ACT should be brought back, not just for sciences but for all majors, for the ability of college students to read has fallen precipitously, too.
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Democratic Party activists have long targeted standardized testing by defaming it as a tool of racial oppression. In 2019, before COVID-19 existed, the Compton Unified School District sued the University of California, accusing it of using SAT and ACT scores to put black and Latino students at a disadvantage. The UC system first suspended the use of standardized tests in admissions in May 2020 because of COVID-19, but in May 2021, the UC system settled its lawsuit with its Compton accusers and eliminated SAT and ACT from its admissions process through 2025.
The UC’s Academic Senate Standardized Testing Task Force had advised against the elimination in a 2020 report, which warned that removing tests would deny admissions officers a vital predictor of college success. Without objective measurement of student ability, grade inflation has run rampant, and students are arriving on campus incapable of handling college-level material
The letter cites a UC San Diego Senate report from last November that the number of students whose mathematics skills “fall below high school level increased nearly thirtyfold” since standardized testing was dropped, and 70% of those students fall below even middle school levels of math competency. At UC Berkeley, for the first time ever, more than one in five first-semester calculus students “displayed severe preparation deficits.”
“Over the past five years, we have seen a widening divergence in mathematical preparation levels within the same classroom,” the letter reads. “Furthermore, the widening spread between underprepared and well-prepared students creates polarized courses, weakening the foundation available to many students and making it harder to teach at the level required for advanced STEM work.”
Reinstitution of standardized testing “is not an obstacle to equity,” the letter argues, but “a prerequisite for it.” “Failing to measure preparation gaps does not remove barriers, it moves them into the classroom, where they become harder to overcome. An admissions process that ignores foundational readiness does a disservice to the most vulnerable students.”
By eliminating the best tool admissions officers had for determining who could do college-level work, militant racial egalitarian activists inflicted harm on well-prepared students by forcing professors to spend less time teaching college-level material, and also inflicted harm on unprepared black and Latino students by admitting them into academic environments in which they were not able to keep up.
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The University of California is not the only institution coming to grips with the damage done by the woke war against standardized testing. Schools including MIT, Dartmouth, Brown, Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Penn, Caltech, Stanford, and Johns Hopkins have all restored standardized testing requirements, and Princeton is scheduled to follow.
California’s settlement with the Compton Unified School District banning the use of standardized tests in admissions ended in 2025. The Board of Regents can go back to using the SAT and ACT. Standardized tests are far better at predicting college readiness than inflated high school transcripts. Colleges that refuse to measure readiness will keep setting up students to fail. UC should restore testing, and the rest of higher education should follow.
