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The University of California Board of Regents chair said Tuesday morning she expects a recommendation from the faculty-led Academic Senate by the end of this academic year on whether the system should reinstate the SAT and ACT for incoming freshmen.
The announcement came shortly after the Senate’s admissions board said it was pulling back on its original timeline to have two working groups — one to consider resurrecting the exams and the other to review high school course requirements for UC admission — through next year. That news, first reported by the Los Angeles Times, caused confusion and doubt over how and when the admissions test question would be addressed.
Regents Chair Maria Anguiano settled that issue at Tuesday’s board meeting after a vast majority of public speakers voiced strong support for reinstituting the SAT and ACT.
“As stewards of this institution, we need to ask a broader and more consequential set of questions,” she said of the admissions process. “What knowledge, skills and experiences best prepare students for success at UC and beyond? We have a responsibility to continually examine whether our understanding of college readiness keeps pace with the changing world around us.”
And, just as important, she said, the system needs to work with educators, families and communities across the state to strengthen students’ academic preparedness.
“The goal of this review is not to rehash old questions or data, but an opportunity to take a fresh look at how we define and evaluate college readiness in a rapidly changing world,” she said. “We anticipate a recommendation from the Academic Senate no later than the end of this academic year.”
Much of the enthusiasm about reinstating the SAT and ACT as a screening tool came from faculty: They’ve been waging a growing campaign to bring back the exams to screen out what they say are underqualified first-year students.
The idea arose in part because of incoming freshmen’s abysmal performance in math. Between 2020 and 2025, for example, the number of students at the University of California San Diego whose math skills fell short of high school standards increased nearly thirtyfold — and 70% of those students were below middle school level.
Reading and writing has suffered mightily, too, in recent years, faculty note.
But some K-12 educators and advocates in the Golden State are skeptical of the idea, saying it will only widen the opportunity gap for students and would fail to address the real and solvable problems in K-12 education — particularly around teacher readiness.
“That exam will be a gatekeeper, punishing the most under-resourced districts, schools and communities,” said Rodolfo Ornelas, whose position as STEM coordinator at Oakland Unified School District was recently eliminated because of budget cuts. “Districts like Oakland Unified serve some of our most vulnerable populations and attract teachers who are newer in their career or are on a number of emergency credentials.”
Ornelas will soon start a job at San Francisco Unified School District where he will coach new principals. He said one of the most fundamental problems with math instruction is that many educators don’t know how to teach the subject effectively.
“A lot of times, they lack that content knowledge and the confidence to even teach mathematics, so they teach it the way they learned it and so that’s where we see our kids getting shortchanged,” Ornelas said. “Or you see these districts typically prioritizing literacy without realizing math needs to be an equal partner.”
Educators point to COVID-related learning loss, chronic absenteeism and the corrosive nature of social media as other factors that play into college students’ poor math performance. They say the university system must work closely with K-12 schools to help ensure students have the skills they need.
Andrea McChristian, national policy director for Just Equations, a California-based math equity group, said the use of the SATs and ACTs in admissions runs against the university system’s stated goals.
“Their core mission and admissions policy says that they’re supposed to be representative of the student population in the state,” she said. “So, if you’re saying that as a public institution you want to represent the diversity of student voices and student experience in the state, yet you’re putting in this screener in the admissions process — which has been shown to lessen and suppress that very diversity that you want to have within your class — then something’s not adding up there.”
After the regents meeting, Just Equations Executive Director Pamela Burdman called for greater transparency in the process moving forward and questioned the fast-moving events of the last few days.
“The abandonment of the originally announced plan came on the eve of today’s regents meeting — in which the public had its first opportunity to comment on the idea of reinstating admissions tests — and amid intense pressure from a group of faculty demanding that the regents take an immediate vote, with no time to inquire into the evidence,” she said.
The university system stopped requiring the SAT or ACT in 2020 and then in 2021, said the tests could not be used at all in admissions as part of a settlement to a civil rights lawsuit brought by four students, six nonprofits and the Compton Unified School District. The 2019 complaint charged that the UC system knowingly created barriers to higher education for students of color and those with disabilities by relying on the SAT and the ACT.
Around the same time, Gov. Gavin Newsom expressed strong reservations about the exams, saying their use “exacerbates the inequities for underrepresented students, given that performance on these tests is highly correlated with race and parental income, and is not the best predictor for college success.” His office did not respond to requests for comments.
But those working within the nine-school, 237,000 undergraduate student university system disagree: more than 3,000 faculty members submitted letters last month imploring school leadership to bring back the tests.
The first, signed by 2,300 people, called for the admissions exams to be reinstated for incoming students applying to STEM majors.
“We now observe preparation gaps so severe that instructors must re-teach middle school mathematics while simultaneously teaching the material students need for sciences, engineering, economics, and other qualitatively demanding fields,” the STEM faculty wrote. “UC has finite resources and can only help so many students, and only when the preparation deficits they need to overcome are within reach.”
The second letter, signed by 900 faculty members in social sciences, humanities, arts, business, law, education and other non-STEM fields, said the SAT’s and ACT’s reading and writing sections were also critically needed indicators.
The university system is also considering using the state-level Smarter Balanced exams — annual math and English tests taken by high school juniors — in admissions, but there are complicating factors with that alternative, including that not every out-of-state applicant takes the test.
Josh Godinez is an assistant high school principal in Southern California and board director for the nearly 2,000-member California Association of School Counselors.
He said he knows socioeconomic status, access to educational resources, mental health and test anxiety can all impact a student’s performance on high-stakes exams like the SAT and ACT. But he still believes standardized tests should be a component of what he called a “holistic” admissions review, adding these exams “provide colleges and universities with a valuable snapshot of a student’s current academic proficiency that complements transcripts, coursework, and other measures of achievement.”
The push to bring back the college entrance exams began at UC Berkeley, about eight miles north of the Oakland Unified School District. Lakisha Young, whose organization The Oakland REACH builds and delivers family-centered learning solutions in partnership with school systems, said the parents of the students who performed poorly in math at the college level surely would have wanted to know their kids were missing key benchmarks in earlier years.
Report cards might not have revealed the depth of their problems with the subject, she said.
“Grades don’t tell the story about competence,” Young said. “If a parent looks at a report card and sees Bs and C pluses, how are they supposed to make that connection? A ‘C’ is at least average. I think a parent would be floored about that, thinking, ‘My child has been moving through the system still stuck at a 6th- or 7th-grade math level.’”
Proponents of returning the admissions tests say they are better measures of how well students will do in college than their high school grades. They argue, too, the exams are a more equitable method of identifying high-performing students from marginal backgrounds than other, more subjective criteria, such as exceptional extracurriculars.
Liz Noone, an instructional coach who helps math teachers inside Oakland USD, is conflicted about bringing back the tests but sees some value in the move because they would allow her students — and her school — to learn how they compare to others.
“People who are in a better socioeconomic position get tutors, they do classes, they get books, they get practice, they do this and that, where our students who are from lower socioeconomic status don’t have access to all those resources and support,” she said. “So, it’s a double-edged sword.”
Dave Kung, executive director of TPSE Math, a professional organization that works to better serve students in higher education mathematics, said the original decision to pull the entrance tests was based on an observed inequality — but was not a solution to the underlying problem.
“We saw an injustice — big equity gaps on SATs, especially for students of color — and tried to act like that wasn’t the result of deeper issues: poverty, generational wealth, the echoes of educational exclusion,” he said. “Instead, we thought ignoring it might make it go away, or at least diminish the problem. That was clearly overly optimistic thinking.”
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