In the spring of 2023, UC Berkeley math professor Zvezdelina Stankova began to notice that about a third of her students were “in freefall.” They weren’t showing up to lectures or doing their homework, and, on tests, they scored far below the average. At first, she thought it was an anomaly, but her observations were reinforced by a 2025 UC San Diego report that found that 1 in 12 of the campus’s incoming students tested below middle school math standards.
The development comes after the UC Board of Regents dispensed with standardized testing as a requirement of admission in 2020. That decision has since caused a rupture between faculty who feel the tests are an important measure of college preparedness and those who feel they discriminate against underrepresented students.
In June, Stankova, along with fellow Berkeley math professor Svetlana Jitomirskaya and three other professors, penned an open letter calling for the SAT/ACT math section to be reinstated as a consideration for admissions into STEM programs. It was followed by another letter from social sciences faculty calling for reinstatement of the reading and writing component. Together, the letters have garnered more than 3,000 signatures from faculty—including five Nobel laureates—across the UCs.
The pro-test camp points to a 2020 systemwide review from the Berkeley Academic Senate that was conducted at the request of then–UC President Janet Napolitano. The review found standardized test scores to be “better predictors of first-year GPA than high school grade point average, and about as good at predicting first-year retention, UGPA [undergraduate grade point average], and graduation.” The tests, they concluded, were also “better predictors of success for students who are Underrepresented Minority students, who are first generation, or whose families are low income.”
“Stankova likens it to trying to prepare someone who’s never driven to win a Formula One race.”
At Napolitano’s recommendation, however, the regents took a different path, suspending the SAT/ACT requirement, a decision many academics support. Plans were made to develop a UC-specific test, but to date, no such test has materialized.
Saul Geiser, M.A. ’68, Ph.D. ’79, a research associate at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at Berkeley, said that the SAT is ill-suited to test STEM preparation as most of it only tests at a tenth-grade algebra level. When controlled for factors like income or race, he contends, GPA is a stronger predictor of first-year outcomes. His research found that the test disadvantages those from less privileged backgrounds.
The pro-test side, however, argues that no admissions standard is without equity concerns. The social sciences faculty noted in their letter that the number of extracurricular activities that applicants report and the writing style of essays are also “strongly associated with social class.” Standardized testing, other test proponents add, can actually favor equity by identifying “diamonds in the rough”: talented students from underrepresented groups.
Geiser doesn’t buy it. “The decision of Ivy League colleges to reinstate the SAT has produced the opposite result, with dramatic declines in minority enrollment. It is an illusion to believe that UC would not experience the same adverse outcome,” he wrote in an email.
Writing in EdSource, Patricia Gándara, professor emerita of education at UCLA, said that rather than deny opportunities to under-equipped students, the UCs should strive to meet their instructional needs.
The Berkeley math department does currently offer a foundational math class, launched in 2023, aimed at getting students “up-to-speed with the expectations of UC Berkeley’s lower division mathematics courses.” It’s essentially a high-school level pre-calculus class covering material such as exponents, logarithmic functions, and complex numbers.
Stankova says it is not enough; she likens it to trying to prepare someone who’s never driven to win a Formula One race. “We care for the students. We don’t want students who would fail when they come here,” she said. But “that kind of low preparation is out of reach.”
Gabriel Rossman, a UCLA sociology professor, thinks that without the test, admissions is essentially a “coin toss” between two otherwise identical students.
In terms of equity and access, he said that UC has a mission of “excellence and research” that should be “open to everybody … who has demonstrated excellence,” but feels it is adequately addressed by California’s three-tiered model of higher education. “That’s why we have an excellent system of community colleges and Cal States. And we have a large number of transfers.”
Stankova and Rossman are optimistic that some sort of testing requirement will be reinstated. Recently, the UC regents sped up the timeline for recommendations on standardized testing, changing the deadline from fall to June 2027.
But even if the SAT/ACT requirement does return, it won’t happen right away. The first cohort of students who will be required to take the SAT may not enroll until the fall of 2030, Stankova said—a full decade after the tests were dropped.