The University of California is reviewing its five-year ban on SAT and ACT requirements after more than 1,400 professors, backed by the system's own data, warned that incoming freshmen cannot handle middle-school math.
The UC Academic Senate announced Thursday it is launching a formal review of the system's 2021 decision to drop standardized testing from its admissions process, following an open letter signed by more than 1,400 faculty members demanding the tests come back. Seven of UC's nine mathematics department chairs signed. So did 43 other STEM department chairs across the system. The Senate's Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools will convene an 18-member work group, delivering initial findings to the Regents in July, with final recommendations due May 2027. Any reinstated testing requirement could not take effect before fall 2028 at the earliest.
The letter's language was stark. "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 professors wrote. Faculty described a growing disconnect between what a UC admissions offer promises and what the classroom demands, with professors absorbing the gap in real time during courses never designed as remediation.
The numbers are hard to dispute. A November 2025 report from UC San Diego's Senate-Administration Workgroup on Admissions found roughly 1 in 8 incoming freshmen testing below middle-school math standards. In 2020, when UC first suspended standardized testing, the figure was about 1 in 200. The UC San Diego remedial math course that once served roughly 50 students grew to nearly 500 by fall 2023. UC Berkeley's own diagnostic data found that 20 to 30 percent of first-semester calculus students displayed severe preparation deficits between fall 2021 and fall 2023, according to the faculty letter.
California suspended the SAT and ACT in 2020, initially as a pandemic accommodation, then made the elimination permanent in 2021. The rationale was equity: standardized tests, critics argued, disadvantaged low-income, Black, and Latino students. The faculty letter challenges that logic on the evidence. Students admitted without a demonstrated math floor are arriving academically stranded in courses they were admitted to but not prepared for.
Opponents of reinstatement argue the move would again reduce Black and Latino enrollment. That concern shaped the composition of the review's work group, which includes faculty from both humanities and STEM disciplines, UC admissions experts, and a representative of the state education board. The faculty petition frames the math deficiencies as an equity failure of a different kind, a promise of a UC education made to students who were then left without the foundation to complete it.
The open letter asked specifically that STEM applicants be required to submit SAT or ACT math scores starting with the 2027-28 admissions cycle. The formal review is broader, also examining the A-G course prerequisites California high schoolers must complete for UC eligibility.
What the July Report Will Tell
UCSD faculty make up the largest single campus bloc supporting reinstatement, according to Times of San Diego, a detail that reflects how concentrated the documented math deterioration is at that campus. But the Berkeley calculus data make clear the problem is not confined to La Jolla.
The July briefing to the Regents will be the first formal signal of where the review is heading. Final recommendations come in May 2027, and the political pressure in both directions will be considerable. If the Regents follow the faculty's lead, the reversal would represent a meaningful retreat from an equity-framed policy that California's own professors now say has produced measurable academic harm. Whether UC's leadership is willing to act on what its review finds is a separate question, and in California, not a simple one.
Also read: Garland Issued School Board Memo After DOJ Lawyers Said No Federal Law Applied • Loudoun Schools Chief Defends Transgender Overnight Policy Before Congress • Federal watchdog confirms Biden officials defied Title IX court order
