The SAT misses the point: Tech, not admissions, drives student underpreparedness | Editorials

The university is in turmoil.

Last month, UC faculty made national headlines as more than 2,000 faculty members across various disciplines signed open letters calling for the reinstatement of standardized testing in UC admissions.

They allege that the removal of standardized testing has led to declining student preparedness across the university. Other SAT advocates claim that no admissions metric is free of class influence and that, relative to “soft” metrics such as extracurriculars, the test provides a more concrete measure of “academic preparation.”

Meanwhile, detractors denounce the SAT for its demonstrably negative effect on admission rates for students from racial minorities and under-resourced areas. Given that access to test preparation resources and SAT testing sites is unequal, they caution that returning to considering SAT scores in admissions will reduce the diversity of admitted classes.

In its specificity, this discourse obscures a more fundamental problem with education, one which the reinstatement of a test cannot solve. New technologies have harmed student learning at both the high school and collegiate levels. To focus on the SAT, or any other singular admissions criterion, misses the point: Student achievement will continue to decline as long as more fundamental barriers to student success persist.

Educators, students and parents have yet to fully reckon with the impact that social media, alongside other addictive new technologies, has had on education both inside and outside the classroom. Phones in classrooms are linked to worse educational outcomes, shortening attention spans and worsening mental health.

Outside the classroom, students are reading less than ever, instead spending their time on the cheap, quick entertainment offered by online platforms. It is little wonder that students are falling short of the standards set by their pre-social media peers.

Artificial intelligence models — particularly large language models, or LLMs — threaten to deteriorate student learning even more quickly. Already, freshman-level computer science classes have seen failure rates skyrocket by up to 500%, which professors attribute to the increased use of AI in the classroom. Increasingly, students are able to delegate the most fundamental and rewarding parts of learning, such as homework and reading, to AI, bypassing the fundamental processes necessary to master core concepts.

At the high school level, this is much more concerning. Already, undergraduates are using AI to cheat their way through college classes, failing to substantively engage with the material they’re taught. How can we reasonably expect high school students — who can use LLMs to cheat on their geometry homework or write their 9th-grade English essay — to walk onto their university campuses prepared?

This is not a UC issue; this is a nationwide issue that the UC system is attempting to free itself from with the SAT. Changing its admissions criteria may, in the short term, provide the university with better-prepared students. However, the Editorial Board is dismayed to see the university utilize admissions reform as a solution to student underpreparedness while leaving structural barriers to learning largely untouched.

Reinstating the SAT rests on the fantasy that there is a large pool of perfectly prepared students unaffected by the educational disruptions of the digital age, and that the university’s only mistake has been failing to select them. This logic is at best naive and at worst threatens to reify the elitism and stratification which already affect our admissions process. The UC system should not open its golden gates exclusively to students who are able to pay for bespoke tutoring or top-of-the-line test preparation.

Further, the SAT should not be mistaken for a full measure of what college readiness ought to mean. Incentivizing students to study the formula for the arc length of a circle seems unlikely to translate into success in a data structures class. Likewise, students who are highly proficient at identifying comma splices may not be similarly skilled at interpreting Dante.

It is rash to settle for the reinstatement of the SAT in admissions. It is a bandage solution that will deprive the university of a wide breadth of students with potential and compromise its mission as a vehicle for social and economic mobility. If the UC system truly wants to lead the way in public education, it should not be more selective in whom it chooses to admit, but should instead invest its resources in bettering its applicant pool.

This Editorial Board believes that the UC should make a durable, holistic commitment to improving educational outcomes on and off its campus rather than pontificate over a shallow modification to its admissions process.

This could mean investing in a standardized test specific to the UC system with curricula and test prep distributed to public schools across the state. This could also involve funding public schools across California and providing UC college counselors to underfunded public schools.

Significant precedent exists for the latter. UC Berkeley, for instance, already devotes significant resources to supporting underfunded Bay Area high schools through its Early Academic Outreach Program. Brown University dedicates $10 million each year to supporting local public education; a similar program could allow California schools to dedicate more resources to literacy and math tutors in low-income districts.

On campus, the UC must commit to a more comprehensive and lasting solution to the twin challenges of social media-enabled distraction and AI-enabled cheating. This must involve, at least, curricular redesigns to get screens out of the classroom. If the university has the time to conduct a lengthy study on student preparedness, its efforts are not well spent on reevaluating standardized tests. It could instead examine potential pedagogical initiatives, particularly the effectiveness of increasing the number of in-person examinations in STEM courses and instituting timed, in-class interpretations of texts in the humanities.

UC Berkeley has the money to spend on these initiatives, boasting an endowment estimated at $8.5 billion as of 2025 and an annual budget estimated at $4.1 billion. Further, it has committed $557 million to a new building for the College of Computing, Data Science, and Society, which it describes as a “hub for AI-driven discovery.” It is dismaying to watch campus pour money into a technology that is cannibalizing student achievement across its disciplines.

There is a clear crisis here, one not only of education, but of identity. Universities everywhere are contemplating their roles in a rapidly changing world. The University of California, specifically, is disillusioned. Amid the race to develop faster models of artificial intelligence and to maintain its status at the top of various humanities and social sciences fields, the UC system must balance conflicting goals, holding profit, prestige, research and education in constant friction.

Professors calling for the reinstatement of the SAT are correct that student educational achievement is on the decline. However, recognizing that the student underpreparedness extends beyond admissions, the university ought to commit to student success rather than cynically limit entry for low-income students while ignoring the creeping educational catastrophe represented by artificial intelligence.

The university claims that “college should be available to everyone” but has yet to invest in making that vision a reality. It’s time we put our money where our mouth is.