UC to – Six years after University of California regents eliminated SAT and ACT requirements, UC’s admissions board says it will reconsider standardized testing after faculty warned that incoming students are so weak in math instructors must reteach material. The Acad
The debate reopened Thursday in the most direct way possible: after faculty complained that many incoming University of California students are falling short in math, the UC admissions leadership said it will reconsider whether the system should once again require SAT and ACT scores.
The potential reversal carries weight beyond UC campuses. UC is the nation’s largest public university system and its decisions have repeatedly reshaped the wider argument over standardized testing—what it measures. who it helps. and whether it can be replaced by alternatives that colleges can actually use to prepare students for college-level work.
The decision was announced by the UC-wide Academic Senate’s Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools, a body that makes recommendations to UC leadership, including President James B. Milliken, and to the UC Board of Regents.
The timing lands amid a loud, months-long push from within UC itself. More than 1. 400 UC professors—many in math. science. technology and engineering—signed an open letter last month calling on UC to reinstate the admissions tests. They argued that many students arrive with preparation gaps so severe that instructors “must reteach middle-school mathematics.”.
That plea followed a striking UC San Diego Academic Senate report released in fall 2025. The report found a roughly 30-fold increase between 2020 and 2025 in incoming first-year students whose math skills tested below high school level, with 70% of those students falling below middle school levels.
Before the admissions board’s Thursday announcement, the UC-wide Academic Senate also moved forward with a broader effort. Last March, it launched a plan to further study the admissions process, including high school course requirements.
Revisiting tests is not immediate. The decision to revisit standardized testing rests with the UC Board of Regents, not the Academic Senate. If the tests are reinstated, the change would not take effect until the fall of 2028 at the earliest.
The Academic Senate said it will convene a work group over the next year to examine the issue. At least 18 members are expected to include faculty from a range of disciplines. including STEM and humanities. along with UC admissions and enrollment experts and a representative of the state education board.
In the road map released Thursday, the committee is set to investigate “the advantages and disadvantages” of relying on SAT/ACT scores. It will also examine California’s 11th grade Smarter Balanced Assessment English language arts and math scores.
Milliken framed the reconsideration as a readiness problem UC leaders have to solve. In a statement. he said UC leadership and the regents “take very seriously the critical issue of college preparedness.” He described the senate plan as a “comprehensive. data-driven review to support its recommendations to strengthen student readiness and success at UC. ” adding. “There are few things more important on our agenda … It’s important that UC gets this right.”.
The senate’s chair, Ahmet Palazoglu, offered a sharper acknowledgement of the challenge. In a letter, Palazoglu wrote that it “has become clear that academic preparedness for college is a growing challenge.”
He also emphasized that academic preparedness issues for college are not limited to UC. Palazoglu said the “widening gap in college readiness among high school graduates is not a new phenomenon but rather an ongoing issue. likely driven by many factors affecting admissions and students’ academic success across the country.” He “strongly” supported further study of testing with a “deliberate. evidence-based” approach. while not endorsing reinstating requirements.
Alongside the testing review. the Academic Senate also described a separate work group to look at whether UC should change the 15 yearlong high school courses required for admission. That committee will focus on course requirements. with the board pointing to concerns that they “may be overly prescriptive/rigid and. as such. may not effectively address changing workforce needs. widespread adoption of AI. UC faculty concerns about preparation. ongoing shifts in student learning styles. and students’ need to apply knowledge and skills to current real-world scenarios.”.
Any modifications to the high school course requirements would also need approval from the UC Board of Regents.
The push to reconsider the tests is striking precisely because UC eliminated them years ago for reasons tied to fairness. UC gained national attention in May 2020 when regents voted unanimously to suspend testing requirements and eliminate them entirely by 2025. Board members said they worried the SAT and ACT were biased against students of color and people from lower-income families. including students who lacked access to prep courses.
That 2020 decision ran against faculty advice. The Academic Senate’s Standardized Testing Task Force that year urged UC to keep test requirements in place. It said test scores “correlate with important outcomes like first-year GPA. retention. and graduation rates” and were “a better predictor of first-year college GPA” than high school GPAs.
Then-UC Riverside chancellor Kim Wilcox agreed with keeping tests, saying “eliminating the tests could make inequities worse.” Other campus leaders, including the then-UC Berkeley chancellor, spoke in favor of dropping testing requirements.
After then-UC President Janet Napolitano pushed the issue. regents who had been reluctant to remove SAT and ACT requirements switched direction. voting unanimously to phase out testing and explore creating a UC-specific exam. A later UC Feasibility Study Work Group concluded that creating a new test would take too long.
Since then, several elite institutions have reversed course. Harvard, Brown, Dartmouth, the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford each restored testing requirements in 2024 or 2025.
On the ground, college counseling professionals say student behavior has already shifted, even before UC makes any change. Lisa Carlton. president of the Independent Educational Consultants Assn. said. “Testing continues over the last couple of years to be back on the upswing.” She added that counselors are seeing many students “testing and taking that more seriously. ” unless they have a serious reason not to.
Carlton acknowledged equity concerns at the same time. “Access to test prep tutoring is an issue of equity. … There’s a population that can afford those resources. and that isn’t everyone.” She said counselors. students. families and schools need to keep asking a practical question: “What is going to genuinely help students be prepared for college?”.
The dispute inside UC now centers most heavily on math readiness. In addition to the UC San Diego report. a study at UC Berkeley recently found that at least 20% of first-semester calculus students who took a diagnostic exam between fall 2021 and fall 2023 were deficient. Minutes from last month’s meeting of the UC-wide Academic Senate’s admissions board also noted math skills concerns at UC Irvine. UC Riverside and UC Merced.
There is countervailing evidence, too. A 2025 UC Institutional Research and Academic Planning report found that student outcomes before and after SAT/ACT requirement were mostly stable. It concluded that the “overall impacts” of COVID-19 and the elimination of standardized testing requirements “appear limited.”.
Another 2025 publication from Saul Geiser of the UC Berkeley Center for Studies in Higher Education argued that the SAT is “a poor fit for America’s public universities.” Geiser said high school GPA outperforms the SAT in predicting first-year student success once income and race are controlled. and he argued that ranking applicants by SAT scores disadvantages high-achieving low-income. first-generation and underrepresented minorities.
Thursday’s Academic Senate statement tried to keep the process anchored to evidence and stakeholder discussion. Palazoglu wrote that any proposed changes to UC’s admissions requirements or processes would be subject to review by the Academic Senate. consultation with stakeholders. consideration by UC leadership. and then review and approval by the UC Board of Regents. He said the senate would be guided by evidence and would “go where the data takes us.”.
He closed with a promise that UC leaders would focus on outcomes for students already in the system. “We want every student admitted to UC to make the most of their college education,” Palazoglu wrote. “Our responsibility is to ensure that our policies and practices make that possible.”
University of California UC Academic Senate SAT ACT standardized testing math readiness admissions UC Board of Regents Smarter Balanced Assessment college preparedness