When could UC bring back the SAT? A key timeline just disappeared

The University of California’s timeline for considering a return of the SAT and ACT exam requirement for applicants is suddenly in flux after the faculty board of admissions quietly rescinded its two-year “roadmap” Friday, just ahead of the UC regents meeting in San Francisco this week. 

The Academic Senate’s influential Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools recently laid out a detailed timeline for UC to consider the controversial question of whether to resume requiring standardized test scores. After the Chronicle reported Monday on the surprise rescinding of the BOARS plan, the Academic Senate chair responded that the university still intends to consider the question. 

“The Academic Senate is not rescinding its commitment to a comprehensive review of standardized testing in admissions,” said Ahmet Palazoglu, UC’s Academic Senate chair. “Recognizing the significance of this issue, the Academic Senate is revising its timeline while ensuring the forthcoming review is thorough, evidence-based and informed by faculty expertise.”

Whether the tests help or hurt the university and its students is the subject of fierce debate that has drawn national attention after more than 3,000 professors across the state petitioned university leaders in May to reinstate the admission exams they abandoned during the COVID-19 pandemic. In June the university said it would consider doing so. The student government opposes restoring the tests, arguing that they favor wealthier applicants and limit access to UC for those from low-income families. 

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The controversy has loomed over the regents’ meeting, scheduled for Tuesday and Wednesday – though the board won’t vote on the testing issue. That decision had been expected to take at least a year and a half under the BOARS plan.

On June 5 BOARS adopted a timeline calling for two faculty-led groups to study whether to recommend that the tests be restored – and whether the overall academic requirements to qualify for UC admission were sufficient. Ultimately, UC’s president, James Milliken, would have decided whether to recommend that the regents adopt the groups’ findings. If so, the regents were likely to have voted in early 2028.  

Yet the roadmap had few supporters. Those who want to restore the tests said the timeline took far too long. Test critics preferred the status quo.

The roadmap had appeared prominently on the BOARS website. “It disappeared this morning, or maybe yesterday,” said Michael Stryker, emeritus professor of physiology at UCSF and BOARS member.

It was unclear why BOARS rescinded the plan. Stryker, who agrees with thousands of faculty members who have been urging the regents to reinstate the admissions tests they suspended during the pandemic, said he could not discuss the board’s deliberations or reveal the vote count. But the decision was not unanimous, he said. 

The timing and shape of UC’s review remain unclear. One possibility is that the regents could vote far sooner than 2028 on whether to bring back the admissions tests, said Stryker, who has served on the 12-member board for two years, his second stint on the panel.

“This frees the Academic Senate and the regents to act on a different schedule from what was” in the Roadmap for First-Year Undergraduate Admissions, as the timeline was called, said Stryker.

A UC spokesperson referred the Chronicle to Palazoglu’s statement. BOARS chair David Volz did not respond to a request for comment. 

Regardless of the latest action by BOARS, the regents cannot vote on whether to restore the exams at this week’s meeting. All decisions require at least 10 days’ notice to the public under the state’s Bagley-Keene open meetings law. 

The stakes in the debate are high: More than 200,000 high school students vied for a seat at UC last year, a record number of applicants that extended a surge in applications that began in 2021 after UC dropped the testing requirement.

Here is a look at the controversy:

Thousands of UC academics have spoken collectively to say removing the exams was a failed experiment. 

In one petition aimed at UC decision-makers, professors point to a math crisis in which growing numbers of students appear baffled by algebra and other basics. It’s an academic disaster that tests would have weeded out, they say, citing a November report from UC San Diego that found 8.3% of incoming students could not do even middle school math. 

A second petition says the admissions exams are also needed in the humanities because other methods of diagnosing academic weaknesses, such as students’ GPAs, are crumbling due to “K-12 grade inflation and the growing use of AI in admissions essays.”

Opposing reinstatement is the UC Student Association, the systemwide student government, which on Monday sent a letter to Regents Chair Maria Anguiano expressing “deep concern with recent pressure” from faculty. The students say that requiring admissions tests “tilts the scale and likelihood of admission towards more advantaged applicants.”  

Yes – but every regents vote requires a proposal. Now that the original roadmap has been rescinded, it’s not yet clear when the revised timeline will emerge. 

It’s already too late to require scores from high school seniors applying for fall 2027. But for next year’s applicants – those applying to become freshmen in fall 2028 – a proposal would have to come before the regents for a vote in the next several months. That way, applicants would have multiple opportunities to take the tests in 2027 and use their highest score. The first ACT exam scheduled next year is Feb. 27, with a registration deadline of Jan. 22. Next year’s first SAT is on March 6, with Feb. 23 as the latest date to register.

On Oct. 29, 2019, lawyers for low-income students of color in California sent a letter to the UC regents demanding that they stop using SAT and ACT scores for admission on grounds that the tests illegally favored wealthier white applicants who could afford test-prep classes and tutors. Weeks later, in December, the students sued.

In May 2020, as schools turned to remote instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic, the UC regents made the admissions tests voluntary. But in September, a judge said that wasn’t enough and issued a preliminary injunction barring UC from accepting the scores at all for an unspecified time.

“Nondisabled, economically advantaged, and white test-takers have an inherent advantage in the testing process,” Alameda County Superior Court Judge Brad Seligman said in his ruling, which was influenced by students’ limited access to tutors and test-prep classes during the pandemic.

No. UC appealed the judge’s ruling, and the sides settled in May 2021. UC agreed not to use the admissions tests through spring 2025. If the regents “choose a new exam for use in undergraduate admissions in the future,” the settlement requires them to “consider access for students with disabilities in the design and implementation of any such exam.”

The SAT is a standardized test administered digitally by the nonprofit College Board. Colleges that accept the SAT typically include the scores among other admissions criteria. The test takes more than two hours and covers reading/writing and math. Both sections are scored on a scale of 200 to 800 points. Students can take the test multiple times, and use their best score.  U.S. students pay $68 to take each SAT, although fee waivers are available for those who need them. 

The ACT is a two-hour exam administered digitally and on paper by the nonprofit ACT Inc. There are three required sections: English, math and reading. Each is scored on a scale of 1 to 36. (Science and writing are optional.) Colleges that accept the ACT typically include the scores among other admissions criteria. The test costs $75, with extra fees for optional subjects. 

The vast majority of four-year universities — maybe 90% — don’t require SAT or ACT scores. But 17 highly selective universities, which halted the tests during the pandemic, have been bringing them back. Among them are Stanford, the California Institute of Technology, Harvard, MIT, Dartmouth, Brown and Yale. Claremont McKenna College, near Los Angeles, as well as Columbia and Princeton, will require the scores for students entering in fall 2028.

In his 2022 explanation for why MIT was restoring the SAT, Stu Schmill, dean of admissions, said the university’s ability to predict academic success “is significantly improved by considering standardized testing — especially in mathematics.” 

He said the tests also help “identify academically prepared, socioeconomically disadvantaged students” who might otherwise be missed because they attend schools without many options for advanced coursework and lack access to other “expensive enrichment opportunities.” 

Stanford gave similar reasons in 2024 when it cited a faculty study indicating that SAT and ACT scores were “an important predictor of academic performance at Stanford.” The university also emphasized that the tests were only one part of its “holistic review” of applicants. 

Opponents say the tests are no more fair to low-income students than they ever were.

“Taking SAT scores into account favors students whose families earn more and not students who may benefit most from a UC education,” UC Berkeley School of Law professor Jonathan Glater wrote last month in a Chronicle opinion piece.

Glater cited a 2024 study by the College Board showing that the percentage of SAT-takers who met math and reading/writing benchmarks — meaning their scores suggested they would earn at least a C in early college courses — was far higher among wealthier students: 63% of kids from families with a median income of at least $117,610, compared with 23% whose families earned between $55,668 and $71,991.

“We know that SAT scores closely track family income and that family incomes reflect discrimination and histories of exclusion,” Glater wrote. “It’s not fair.”

What’s not fair, exam supporters say, is letting UC students flounder in essential subjects when the SAT and ACT could diagnose those problems early.

“Basic mathematical fluency is analogous to literacy; without it, success in university-level STEM becomes structurally unattainable for students,” the professors wrote in their petition, using the common shorthand for “science, technology, engineering and math.”

Admissions tests could filter out these escalating problems, they said:

• Preparation gaps so severe that instructors must reteach middle-school mathematics.

• Gaps between underprepared and well-prepared students that make it “harder to teach at the level required for advanced STEM work,” and faculty feel “growing pressure to dilute quantitative rigor.”

• UC having to spend its “finite resources” on remedial education.

“We recognize concerns about equity and access. However, no admissions criterion is uncorrelated with social background,” humanities professors argued in their separate petition.

“As artificial intelligence becomes more capable, it is arguably more important than ever for students to be able to think through and compose sound arguments on their own, to comprehend the texts they read, and to recognize weaknesses in the arguments of those texts,” they wrote, noting that admissions tests reinforce these skills.

It is unclear whether the revised review will still consider an alternative exam. It had called for a committee to  also evaluate whether California’s “Smarter Balanced Assessment,” used to test 11th-grade math and English skills, should be used in admissions decisions.