About a dozen first-year UC Berkeley students gathered one afternoon last fall inside a classroom in Evans Hall, where math professor Zvezdelina Stankova held office hours for one of her calculus sections.
The students came for calculus help but struggled to answer a middle-school level algebra problem: solving for x from the equation 7x – 5 = 9.
“I told everyone to drop their pens and watch,” Stankova said. “We had to go through it step by step.”
Across the University of California, math faculty say they are increasingly teaching first-year students who are unprepared for college-level math and unable to survive coursework for UC’s rigorous science and math majors.
Some faculty members are now calling on UC to reinstate standardized tests as an admissions requirement for freshman applicants in science, math, technology and engineering programs. More than 1,400 faculty — mostly from STEM programs — have signed an open letter making that demand.
“Over the past five years, we have seen a widening divergence in mathematical preparation levels within the same classroom. This trend indicates that current admissions practices do not provide a sufficiently reliable check on mathematical readiness for STEM majors,” faculty wrote in the letter.
The open letter, crafted by Stankova and four other UC Berkeley professors, laid bare faculty’s simmering tensions over students’ math preparedness at one of the world’s leading STEM universities, where prime parking spots are reserved for Nobel laureates.
The timing of the letter’s release comes as UC’s Academic Senate is considering whether to recommend that the system bring back standardized testing as an admissions requirement. The full Senate will meet Thursday and is expected to hear from the chair of the Senate’s Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools, which has been deliberating the issue.
UC’s Board of Regents would also need to eventually approve the change and reverse its own 2020 decision to get rid of the SAT and ACT as a freshman admission requirement.
A UC spokesperson said in a statement that system leaders are taking concerns about math preparation seriously. UC officials have “been working with faculty leaders for several months to identify policies that will continue to ensure students arrive at UC academically prepared,” the spokesperson added.
If math faculty are successful in their push to reinstate the SAT, the fall 2028 admission cycle is the earliest it would take effect.
A group of five UC Berkeley professors has taken it upon themselves to write an open letter calling for the return of a test requirement for freshman STEM applicants. As of Monday, 1,427 faculty had signed the letter, including seven of UC’s nine math department chairs.
Faculty argue that other key admissions criteria don’t provide enough information about students’ preparedness. Grade inflation makes it more difficult to put stock in a student’s grade point average, and the proliferation of artificial intelligence means they can’t trust that applicants are writing their own essays.
“So, with that, there is no objective measure for math readiness,” Stankova said.
Trying to create a narrative
Others are not sure standardized testing is the solution.
Test opponents point to a fall 2025 report authored by Saul Geiser, a senior researcher at UC Berkeley’s Center for Studies in Higher Education. The report found that grades were a stronger predictor than test scores of first-year success at Ivy League and other elite colleges, and that ranking applicants by SAT scores disadvantages Black, Latino, low-income and first-generation students.
Geiser’s report also noted that UC has enrolled more Black, Latino and low-income students since the system stopped requiring the exams.
“All it will do is keep students out of mathematics, and it may push some students, especially underrepresented students, out of the UC system,” said Bjorn Birnir, a math professor and chair of the math department at UC Santa Barbara.
Birnir was one of two UC math department chairs who opted not to sign the open letter. He discussed the issue with his department’s undergraduate committee. A majority of faculty on the committee opposed signing the letter.
“We think the problem needs to be addressed in high schools, and they need to make a real effort to make sure their students learn at least some mathematics,” he said.
Some critics also question whether math preparation is as bad as the UC San Diego report claims.
The report pointed out that, in 2024, the number of students placed in one of UC San Diego’s lowest math courses — Math 2 and Math 3B — increased from 490 to 916 students. But that same year, the campus stopped allowing students to use calculators for their placement exams. Also that year, the campus changed the criteria for placing students into a higher level of math, meaning that “many of the students who previously would have been placed into Math 3C were instead placed into Math 3B,” according to UC San Diego’s math department.
Additionally, freshmen at the campus are still doing well enough that they aren’t dropping out. UC San Diego’s first-year retention rate for STEM majors was just over 95% last year, the same level as it was prior to elimination of the SAT.
“It strikes me as being a little bit of a campaign here. I think they’re trying to create a narrative,” said Harry Feder, executive director of FairTest, an organization that opposes high-stakes standardized exams.
Addressing math unpreparedness
Even if the San Diego report overstated the problem, most educators and advocates agree that preparedness has declined in recent years, especially since the Covid-19 pandemic.
At Berkeley, a study found that, as of 2023, nearly one-third of first-semester calculus students displayed “severe preparation deficits.” At UC Davis, the number of students needing to start in a precalculus class has quadrupled over the past five years, Nachtergaele estimated. And at UC Santa Barbara, about 10% of incoming STEM majors are unprepared for calculus, Birnir said.
“It’s been an issue for a long time, but it’s definitely getting worse,” Birnir added.
When admitted STEM majors at UC Santa Barbara aren’t ready for calculus, staff encourage them to take a precalculus course at Santa Barbara City College during the summer before their first term on campus.
For most students, that solves the problem, Birnir said.