By Svetlana Jitomirskaya, Zvezdelina Stankova, Elizabeth Statmore
Together, we three — two math professors at the University of California, Berkeley and one longtime high school math teacher at Lowell High School in San Francisco — have spent our careers on the front lines, working to repair and fortify a California math pipeline that now faces a deep systemic crisis.
Over decades of preparing public high school students, developing mathematically capable young professionals and training university researchers, we have functioned as educational first responders — interrupting learning to rescue students who’ve arrived in their next classrooms stranded without the basic sequential foundations they need from their previous classrooms.
The three of us do not need new longitudinal data to know we are describing the same thing. Independently and from conversations together, we’ve seen it repeatedly: a newly admitted UC freshman in a required math course who freezes the moment a problem doesn’t match the limited patterns they were trained on.
This is not a deficit of intelligence. It’s not a function of privilege. It is what happens when decades of public school K-12 mathematical foundation-building and imagination-building are abandoned for frameworks that make adults feel good because they think they are being inclusive, but they are actually just failing to build students’ adaptive abilities to think for themselves through harder and harder math problems.
This debate is no longer hypothetical. On July 14, UC Board of Regents Chair Maria Anguiano set a firm deadline, requiring faculty leaders to deliver a recommendation on standardized testing no later than June 2027. This would allow UC to require SAT and/or ACT scores again for all undergraduate applications — STEM and non-STEM — in fall 2028.
In a July 8 column in the Los Angeles Times, (“UC could go back to using the SAT and ACT…”) Anita Chabria argued that the whole debate over bringing back the standardized test requirement is about elitism, not readiness. It is not. It’s a disagreement about whether we are telling the truth about the adaptive capacities and mathematical maturity high school graduates need if they are to succeed in the math classes they need for STEM majors and careers.
But there is a conflation at the center of this debate, an argument we heard during public comment at the July 14 Regents meeting. “Who should we admit” and “How prepared are the students we admit” are wrongly being treated as the same question. The UC STEM faculty open letter was never about the first; it was always about the second.
All students who arrive at the University of California deserve an adequate foundation for success in their coursework. A student can be exactly the right person to admit to a UC and still be unprepared for the course sequence they’re enrolled in.
Critics of the letter offered arguments about access, diversity and who deserves a seat — all legitimate questions — but not the question that more than 3,000 UC professors, including five Nobel laureates, actually raised. The letter states, plainly, that the preparation gaps seen under test-blind admissions are well beyond what a single semester of remediation can close: While our letter focused on math, where our expertise and data lie, colleagues in the social sciences and humanities have since published a parallel letter reporting similar underpreparedness in their own courses — evidence that the concerns raised are not limited to STEM.
At the July 14 Regents meeting, opponents of SAT reinstatement relied on tired and flawed arguments. Jessie Ryan of the Campaign for College Opportunity pointed to stable retention and rising graduation rates as reasons to stick with test-free admissions. But aggregate “retention” hides whether students are failing out of the STEM majors they applied for.
Are underprepared students being forced out of quantitative fields into nonquantitative majors just to stay enrolled? Are STEM professors being pressured to pass struggling students to keep institutional numbers high? Are high graduation rates being purchased by lowering standards?
Pamela Burdman of Just Equations argued the real fix is simply better K-12 math instruction, not new admissions criteria. But better K-12 instruction and better information at the admissions gate are not competing fixes. A standardized admissions test is a powerful measure of mastery. UC needs both an honest benchmark and a beacon that guides K-12 graduates upward.
This distinction between mathematical capacity and gap filling is also why UC Santa Barbara’s practice of sending underprepared students to community college for a summer of review is not the fix some believe it is. Almost half of UCSB’s own math faculty signed the open letter, indicating that they see the same problems we do.
These deficits, witnessed throughout the pipeline, over years, and across thousands of students, are not merely missed procedures or concepts. What we’re seeing increasingly among UC students is the absence of the capacity to stay with an unfamiliar problem, absence of patience to tolerate not immediately seeing a pathway through the confusion, and an inability to construct a developmentally appropriate, purpose-built, multistep argument rather than just reach for a memorized technique.
That is not a content gap. It is a lack of adaptive ability that builds slowly, through years of cumulative struggle with problems that do not resolve on the first pattern-match — and there is no way to quickly backfill that process. You cannot summer-school your way into the mathematical maturity required to pursue a STEM major.
On equity grounds, the record also cuts against the case for staying test-blind. By reducing applicants to a sea of identical, inflated GPAs, the university has stripped away one of the few tools that enables a gifted student in a struggling neighborhood school to stand out.
A hard-won B+ in a rigorous urban math program is now casually passed over for a meaningless 4.0 earned elsewhere, confirmed by the data on dropping acceptance rates for inner-city magnet schools.
Restoring the SAT/ACT would give admissions offices an apples-to-apples comparison of students’ true underlying knowledge, and would contextualize otherwise indistinguishable transcripts. This would restore the very ladder used by the state’s most ambitious, disadvantaged kids.
The Academic Senate does not need a yearlong administrative delay until June 2027 to study what is already glaringly obvious. More than 3,000 UC professors — a significant part of the Senate — have already delivered the ground-level verdict.
This crisis demands urgent intervention. The Senate must deliver its emergency recommendation in a month, not a year. The UC Board of Regents must act now and schedule a decisive vote no later than September 2026, to reinstate standardized testing for applications submitted in fall 2027 for the fall 2028 entering class. Every additional month of delay leaves disadvantaged STEM students without a ladder or a lifeline, and the university’s operations and reputation in free-fall.
It is time for the University of California to stop pretending we do not see what we see.
Dr. Jitomirskaya and Dr. Stankova are professors of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Statmore is a math teacher at Lowell High School in San Francisco, one of California’s largest feeder schools to the University of California system.