University of California math professors are calling for the return of the SAT for STEM admissions

More than 600 University of California faculty members, led by mathematicians at UC Berkeley, are calling for the program to reinstate standardized testing requirements for science, technology, engineering and math applicants, saying six years of free admissions still doesn’t test readiness and professors often teach middle school math to incoming students.

Without a standardized test for admissions, professors say they don’t know if incoming students can handle college-level math. The open letter, addressed to UC’s top leaders, calls for SAT or ACT tests to be required starting in the fall of 2027 and for STEM faculty to be given formal oversight of readiness levels in their majors.

“We are now seeing preparation gaps so severe that teachers must re-teach middle school math while simultaneously teaching students the essentials of science, engineering, economics, and other more difficult fields,” they warned.

Over three years – from the fall of 2021 to 2023 – the book said, at least 20% of first-semester Berkeley math students who took diagnostic tests showed a deficiency. “Basic math fluency is like reading; without it, university-level STEM success becomes out of reach for students,” the faculty wrote.

The open letter comes days before the UC Academic Senate’s Board of Admissions and Academic Relations is set to discuss changes to the admissions system, which could be the first step in the possible return of standardized testing to the system at the nation’s largest public research university.

A landmark decision under consideration

UC received national attention in May 2020 when the regents voted unanimously to suspend the SAT and ACT test requirements and eliminate them entirely by 2025. Board members raised concerns the test biases students of color and those from low-income families — including students who may not have access to preparatory courses.

Meanwhile, others hailed the vote as a bold and visionary move to expand access and equality.

But the vote contradicted the UC Academic Senate’s Standardized Testing Task Force, which said the use of test scores could increase admissions rates for students from disadvantaged backgrounds and school districts. The report also found that test scores are a better predictor of college performance than high school grades, but that UC weighed grades more heavily in admissions decisions.

Then in 2020, a California state court judge issued an injunction in a lawsuit brought by students, forcing UC to stop using the points earlier than planned.

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, campuses across the country are also suspending testing requirements for students, including many of the country’s most prestigious institutions. The demand has also started again in the top universities.

Harvard, Brown, Dartmouth, University of Pennsylvania, Stanford and Caltech have each reinstated standardized test requirements for applicants in 2024 or 2025. USC is test-optional and scores are considered as part of the overall review, but students are not penalized if they do not submit them.

UC policy — and California State University’s — allows applicants to submit scores for academic admissions purposes, but only after admissions decisions have been made.

UC leadership has not officially endorsed the faculty’s recommendation for the test, but program leaders said Wednesday they were listening to the concerns.

Rachel Zaentz, a UC spokeswoman, said in a statement that the program “will continue to focus on strengthening education, collaboration and support” for math readiness in partnership with K-12 and higher education institutions.

Ahmet Palazoglu, chair of UC’s Comprehensive Academic Senate, said in a statement that he had heard “concerns raised by UC faculty about student readiness for undergraduate studies,” and that he asked the program-wide admissions board to address “timely topics related to student readiness for college and the UC admissions process.”

The board, he said, is “in the process of proposing a roadmap for policy implementation and building relationships with other state leaders and K-12 education leaders for the next academic year and beyond.”

Increasing UC’s concern with mathematics

Rifts have erupted within UC over admissions tests and math readiness. In November, a report by the UC San Diego Academic Senate panel said it recorded a thirty-fold increase between 2020 and 2025 in incoming first-year students whose math skills tested below high school level. The report said 70% of those students fall below the middle school standards.

Members of the task force advocate “a re-examination of the standard assessment system, as many peer institutions have already done.”

Zvezda Stankova, a teaching professor in Berkeley’s mathematics department who is one of the book’s editors, said the drive to go public comes from her classes. He described the spring 2023 calculus II class as a challenge, which stood out in nearly 30 years of teaching.

“Something has changed a lot, the bottom was removed, 25 to 30% of the students who were in free fall came out.

Stankova said her teammates were expecting more criticism. “Our book will be attacked from all sides,” he said. A math professor argued that the SAT push was helping disadvantaged students.

“I don’t see the SAT hurting diversity. I actually see it helping, because if you currently have a lack of SATs that hurts a few underrepresented people, you’re giving them a ticket, a ticket to get into a big university system, like UC, only to fail. How is that different?” Stankova said.

Not everyone sees returning to testing as the best option. A September 2025 report by Saul Geiser of the UC Berkeley Center for Studies in Higher Education and a former UC admissions officer, said the SAT is “completely inappropriate for America’s public universities.”

Geiser argued that high school GPA outperforms the SAT in predicting success for first-year students when income and race are controlled. He also pointed out that ranking applicants by SAT scores ends up disadvantaging low-income, first-generation and underrepresented applicants.

How good are California high school students at math?

California’s combined test data complicates the picture.

Overall, in statistics, public students are about a quarter of a year behind where they were before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. A quarter of an instructional year translates to about 45 school days or about nine weeks of the school year.

Nationwide, 37.3% of students meet math reading standards in the tested grades.

In 11th grade, the most relevant grade related to college readiness, 30.5% of students met or exceeded the math reading standards. Of this, nearly half skipped the reading level — marking it as the most likely to prepare for a college STEM major.

Any change in UC’s admissions requirements must go through the Senate’s Academic Senate admissions committee before going to the Board of Trustees. Minutes of the admissions board’s March 6 meeting show that members expressed tentative interest in eventually requiring 11th-grade Smart Balanced test scores for California residents and the SAT or ACT for non-residents.

The board plans to submit a first draft on Sunday and a “final road map” on June 30.

Times staff writer Howard Blume contributed to this report.