Ever since the University of California stopped using the SAT and ACT for freshman admissions in 2020, graduation rates have inched up, and the number of students returning for their second year of studies increased.
To backers of keeping the UC test-free, these are clear signs that ditching the SAT hasn’t resulted in broad academic declines at the venerable public university system.
But this progress is likely to compete with another truth: Thousands of UC professors say their students are absolutely not ready for college and blame the decision to cut the SAT. Now UC leaders are re-examining what, if anything, the system should do about the standardized tests the UC scrapped six years ago.
When a UC task force in 2020 recommended that the UC keep the SAT, it warned that dropping the test could result in declining student retention rates. Those prognostications didn’t materialize. The task force also expressed fear that first-year GPAs would drop without it, but new systemwide data show average freshman GPAs have actually increased since 2021, the first year of new students entering under the new no-SAT regime.
But that doesn’t mean some UC students aren’t struggling. Early this summer, roughly 3,000 current and former UC professors launched a campaign via two signed open letters to reinstate standardized tests in admissions. They say more of their students demonstrate weak math and writing skills, and the SAT ban means the system is not doing all it can to screen out students who cannot handle the rigors of the UC.
Those professors, who teach science, technology, engineering and math, as well as the humanities and social sciences, are a fraction of the system's roughly 26,000 faculty.
And while whether the SAT should return is an unsettled question for now, UC leaders have asked a committee of academics to issue a detailed report on the system’s use of the standardized tests by Feb. 12. Then the UC Academic Senate will propose recommendations by June to the UC Board of Regents, which has final say on requiring the SAT. It is not clear if the board will then pursue a vote on whether to reinstate an admissions test requirement.
Nationally, most highly selective colleges and universities have returned to using standardized tests in admissions after not requiring them in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many went the test-optional route, meaning students can submit their scores but aren’t penalized for foregoing the test. UC is among the few college systems that are completely test-blind, so they don’t even look at test scores for admissions.
Officials at those campuses restoring the SAT point to studies that say tests predict whether applicants can do well in college better than high school grades can. Some research papers come to the opposite conclusion, viewing the tests as proxies for family wealth rather than student abilities. Students from well-off homes are much more likely to score high on the SAT than low-income students. To SAT critics, high school grades are a stronger measure, in part because they capture a longer arc of student progress.
The UC Student Association sent a letter to the regents in July opposing a return to the SAT. The association, which represents 237,000 undergraduate students at the UC, “does not believe SAT/ACT will result in better prepared students.” The letter notes that racial and ethnic diversity at the UC increased after 2020.
UC ditched the SAT to counter biases
UC jettisoned the test at an inflection point in the country’s social and academic history. The deadly COVID-19 pandemic that began in 2020 ravaged communities unevenly, with Black people — who were more likely to have in-person jobs that increased their exposure to the disease — dying at more than double the rate of whites.
When the board voted unanimously to end the use of the SAT and ACT, some members, including the UC’s then-president, Janet Napolitano, described the tests as legacies of discrimination. At least one prominent academic who wanted to keep the test agreed, but argued the test was still valuable.
“The main reason we are looking at SATs is because they are racist,” said Kum-Kum Bhavnani, chair of the Academic Senate at the time of the 2020 regents meeting when the board voted to sink the test. But “the way in which the UC uses them stops them from being racist” because admissions officers used the test results as one of 14 factors in assessing applications. The Academic Senate endorsed keeping the SAT.
The regents, including Napolitano, decided that despite the benefits the SAT offered, they did not outweigh how the test seemed to favor rich students over poor students, many of whom are students of color.
However, in a recent interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education, Napolitano indicated she’d be open to revisiting the use of the SAT in admissions, but cautioned that faculty overstate the test’s powers. “I don’t think the SAT is a solution to the question of whether students are adequately prepared,” said Napolitano, now a professor of public policy at UC Berkeley. “It’s not a silver bullet.”
Still, she said admissions officials should use the SAT, “recognizing what it tells you and what it doesn’t tell you.”
Before dumping the test, ultra-selective UCLA admitted students with a wide range of SAT scores. The admissions office didn’t rely on a single cut-off score, said Gary Clark, UCLA’s associate vice chancellor of enrollment management, during a September regents meeting.
In 2019, 50% of admitted students had SAT scores between 1280 and 1530 out of 1600, Clark said. Individual student context is key, he said, and UCLA’s admissions office also relied on 14 factors, including test scores. One of those factors was whether students made the most of their time in high school. One student with a 4.3 GPA may be ranked lower than another student with the same grades because UCLA reviews to what extent students took advantage of the honors and advanced courses available to them. Since the SAT ban, retention and graduation rates increased at UCLA, he added.
Kim Wilcox was chancellor of UC Riverside until 2025 and supports using the SAT in admissions. All admissions indicators are biased against low-income students, he said in a phone interview. “It doesn't matter what measure you have, GPA and SAT scores as well. They're all higher for rich kids than they are for poor kids,” he said. “So with a set of biased measures, are you better with more of them or fewer of them? I would argue more.”
Data show struggles in math but not other subjects
It’s only in calculus-based entry-level math that freshmen across the UC are showing increasing signs of academic struggle, according to an analysis a senior official at the University of California presented to regents members last month.
Broadly, students in entry-level engineering and other science, math and technology courses have posted steady average GPAs of around 3.3 while their rates of Ds, Fs and withdrawals have been stable – around 6% to 7% – since 2021. The same is true for social science and humanities courses.
And few STEM majors leave their major after the first year, indicating strong persistence within the quantitatively demanding subjects. STEM majors graduated in four years at higher rates after the UC went test-blind than before the move.
But low grades increased among students in entry-level calculus, pre-calculus and lower-level preparatory math courses. For them, Ds, Fs and withdrawals spiked from 13% to 18% since the 2021-22 school year. Their average GPAs dropped in that time from 2.95 to 2.71. These classes account for about 5% of freshman enrollment and exclude other types of math classes, including statistics.
However, the UC Office of the President didn’t track those figures before it stopped accepting SAT or ACT scores, so there are no rates to compare them to.
A CalMatters analysis used a public UC Berkeley grading tool to compare first-year calculus performance at that campus before and after the SAT ban. The findings indicate that while GPAs stayed virtually the same between 2017 and 2025, the rate of Ds and Fs increased considerably for various entry-level calculus courses. In the years before the UC dropped the SAT, the combined D and F rates at these fall-term courses hovered at an average of 8%. But that rate of low grades jumped to an average of 11% for the years after the system went test-blind in admissions.
In 2019, around 6% of students in Calculus II courses earned a D or F. But last fall, the rate shot up to about 18%.
UC Berkeley grades can vary from year to year between instructors and course grading curves, so “some level of variation between semesters is to be expected,” wrote Janet Gilmore, a UC Berkeley spokesperson.
She pointed out that the D and F rates in Calculus I courses in fall 2025 were the same as in Fall 2018. Both were at about 11%.
What the pro-SAT faculty say
The professors who want the SAT back say they see more unprepared students, both as a percentage of the incoming class and in raw numbers given that the UC has expanded undergraduate enrollment since 2016 by roughly 27,000 students. In that time total enrollment grew slightly faster than the number of faculty at the system. They also say there is not enough support staff or tutors to help students do well in math and writing courses.
“UC has been a national leader in supporting under-resourced students to do well in mathematics. However, UC has finite resources and can help only so many students, and only when the preparation deficits they need to overcome are within reach,” one of the open letters said.
High school grades aren’t as reliable a measure of how prepared students are, the STEM-focused open letter contends. It argues the SAT is an essential independent check on grade inflation and the use of AI in college essay writing.
Both test scores and high school grades can help predict whether students will do well in college, wrote Li Cai, an education scholar who researches standardized tests at UCLA and signed the open letter to restore the SAT. And while each is an imperfect tool, there are no better alternatives, he observed.
SAT supporters also point to a 2025 UC San Diego faculty report that noted the number of freshmen who needed to repeat high school and even elementary school math soared from about .5% of UCSD college freshmen in 2020 to nearly 12% by 2025. The report observed that in 2024, the students placed in remedial math maintained an A average in their high school math classes. This suggests that high school grade point averages are weak tools for determining who is ready, the report said.
But Pamela Burdman, a critic of the SAT who also advocates for math reforms as executive director of the nonprofit Just Equations, has pointed out that UCSD appears to be an outlier. At seven of UC's nine undergraduate campuses, no students were in courses below pre-calculus. She also observed that the UCSD placement exam introduced a policy in 2024 that barred students from using calculators. That may have increased the number of students shunted to remedial courses, she wrote.
What backers of test-blind policy say
SAT skeptics argue that supporters of the test overstate its predictive value and that they champion an approach to admissions that would needlessly exclude more students from UC. Placing limits on who can enroll by relying on what they say is a flawed assessment has no place at a public university supported by taxpayer money, they contend.
Many of those views were synthesized in a lengthy report in September written by Jesse Rothstein, professor of public policy and economics at UC Berkeley and a critic of using the SAT in admissions.
SAT critics say whatever may be happening in entry-level math courses isn’t translating into overall college struggles, given the higher first-year GPAs, share of students coming back after their first year and the overall graduation rates. If students are generally ready for college but need support in specific math classes, the UC should provide that support and not prevent the student from otherwise entering, the critics say.
“If there are problems in preparation, what is UC doing about it?” asked Amanda Mangaser Savage in a phone interview. She’s a litigator with Public Counsel, the legal group that played a key role in forcing the UC to drop the SAT in admissions.
“Does imposing a barrier in the form of the SAT really address that specific problem,” Savage said, “or is it just designed to make life easier, frankly, for faculty that don't want to be teaching students who have learning needs?”
Public Counsel’s 2019 lawsuit prompted a judge in 2020 to issue a preliminary injunction that forced the UC to drop its plan of using the SAT in a test-optional way. Then, in 2021, they settled with the UC to keep the SAT totally out of admissions through 2025. For both court outcomes, Public Counsel argued that even a test-optional approach was unfair to students with disabilities who needed accommodations during the shutdown period of the COVID-19 pandemic. The settlement expired last year, so the UC can legally bring back the SAT.
If the UC revives the SAT for admissions, Public Counsel may sue again, Savage said.
Critics of the SAT also say the arguments to bring back the test overlook declines in the math readiness of college students that predate the UC’s decision to stop using the SAT for admissions.
California’s high schoolers on average have yet to match pre-COVID-19 math and reading competency levels, though the gap is closing. Nationally, many eighth graders have been scoring lower in math on a highly regarded test since 2012. Fifteen-year-olds globally also struggle with math. The average test scores for dozens of relatively wealthy countries have been steadily declining since 2009, indicated Rothstein. “Changes in University of California admissions rules can’t have caused this,” he wrote in his explainer.
Why the slump in math among older students? There’s no consensus, but experts point to a slew of overlapping headwinds, such as pandemic-era disruptions, chronic school absences that haven’t yet reverted to pre-pandemic levels, teacher shortages and the reliance on uncredentialed instructors, as well as students’ use of generative artificial intelligence to problem-solve.
Rothstein also noted that graduation and retention rates at the UC since 2021 have remained steady or rose systemwide. But to Cai, the education scholar at UCLA, such broad data shouldn’t discount what math professors are seeing.
“Faculty members who teach introductory STEM courses often serve as the first observers of changes in student preparation,” Cai wrote in a response to Rothstein’s explainer. “Their responsibilities and their genuine concerns place them at the interface between admissions decisions and academic outcomes.”
This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.
