Six years after dropping SAT and ACT test requirements, members of an influential University of California admissions board said Thursday that the group will reconsider requiring the standardized tests, a major move favored by faculty who have complained that many students are severely deficient in math.
The potential reversal thrusts the nation’s most prestigious public university system back into a contentious national debate over standardized testing, fairness and college readiness, and follows a wave of elite campuses — including Yale and Caltech — that have already brought the assessments back.
The move, announced by the UC-wide Academic Senate’s Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools, comes amid mounting pressure from UC faculty and outside activists over the test-free approach. More than 1,400 UC professors — many of them in math, science, technology and engineering fields — last month signed an open letter calling on UC to reinstate the admissions tests, setting off intense public advocacy and private lobbying of UC leaders from faculty, parents and students on different sides of the debate.
In their letter, the professors bemoaned that “we now observe preparation gaps so severe that instructors must reteach middle-school mathematics while simultaneously teaching the material students need for sciences, engineering, economics, and other quantitatively demanding fields.”
The plea followed another remarkable fall 2025 report from a UC San Diego Academic Senate group, which 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.
Then last March, the UC-wide Academic Senate launched a process to further study the admissions process, including high school course requirements.
The decision to revisit standardized testing ultimately rests with the UC Board of Regents. If the tests are reinstated, the change would not take effect until the fall of 2028 at the earliest.
The Academic Senate makes recommendations through its Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools to UC leaders, including President James B. Milliken and the regents. The senate said it will convene a work group to meet over the next year to look at the issue. At least 18 members will include faculty from an array of disciplines including STEM and humanities, UC admissions and enrollment experts, and a representative of the state education board.
The road map the Academic Senate released Thursday said the committee will be charged with investigating “the advantages and disadvantages” of relying on SAT/ACT scores as well as California’s 11th grade Smarter Balanced Assessment English language arts and math scores.
The UC Academic Senate chair said in a letter that it “has become clear that academic preparedness for college is a growing challenge.”
“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,” said Ahmet Palazoglu, who is also a chemical engineering professor at UC Davis. He said he “strongly” supported further study of testing with a “deliberate, evidence-based” approach. He did not endorse reinstating requirements or keeping the status quo.
A separate work group will also examine if it’s necessary to change the 15 year-long high school courses UC requires for admission. The board cited 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 high school course requirements would also need approval from regents.
Why UC eliminated the tests
UC gained national attention in May 2020 when regents unanimously voted 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.
The regents’ vote went against the recommendation of UC faculty.
The Academic Senate’s Standardized Testing Task Force that year said UC should keep test requirements in place, saying 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, saying that “eliminating the tests could make inequities worse.” Other campus leaders, including then-UC Berkeley chancellor, spoke in favor of dropping testing requirements.
But with a forceful push from then-UC President Janet Napolitano, regents who had been reluctant to remove the SAT switched gears to unanimously vote to phase out testing and explore creating a UC-specific exam. A UC Feasibility Study Work Group later concluded that a new test would take too long to create.
Other selective institutions that dropped testing around the same time — many related to pandemic disruptions — have reversed course. Harvard, Brown, Dartmouth, the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford each restored testing requirements in 2024 or 2025.
Major concerns around math readiness
The biggest concerns center on math. 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 said that student math skills have also been a concern at UC Irvine, UC Riverside and UC Merced.
A 2025 UC Institutional Research and Academic Planning report found that student outcomes pre- and post-SAT/ACT requirement stayed mostly stable. The study concluded that the “overall impacts” of COVID-19 and elimination of standardized testing requirements “appear limited.”
Another publication the same year, by 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 that the high school GPA outperforms the SAT in predicting first-year student success once income and race are controlled. He also argued that ranking applicants by SAT scores ends up disadvantaging high-achieving low-income, first-generation and underrepresented minorities.
UC leaders said their work will be driven by evidence and dialogue.
“Any proposed changes to UC’s admissions requirements or processes will be subject to review by the Academic Senate, consultation with stakeholders, consideration by UC leadership, and ultimately, review and approval by the UC Board of Regents. Throughout this process, we will be guided by evidence and go where the data takes us,” Palazoglu said in his letter.
“I know we want every student admitted to UC to make the most of their college education. Our responsibility is to ensure that our policies and practices make that possible,” Palazoglu said. “I appreciate the passion, rigor, and commitment UC faculty bring in support of our students, and I look forward to the thoughtful discussions and outcomes this initiative will produce.”