Mina Aganagic is a professor of mathematics and physics at the University of California at Berkeley.
The University of California’s STEM programs have long powered upward mobility and economic growth. In 1960, California built a three-tiered higher-education system designed to ensure excellence and broad access, offering a world-class education at a public-university price. That promise has benefited students, made for a fairer society and produced extraordinary graduates: winners of Nobel Prizes and Turing Awards, astronauts, internet pioneers and transformative inventors.
In an effort to broaden access to STEM — science, technology, engineering and math — for more first-generation, low-income and underrepresented students, UC has been running an experiment: expanding admission without reliably measuring preparation.
This confuses access with admission. Every young person with the talent and drive for a STEM career deserves an opportunity. But admission provides only a seat in a classroom, not the preparation required to succeed in a college-level course.
In spring 2020, the University of California’s Board of Regents suspended the use of SAT and ACT scores in admissions amid concerns that standardized tests were inequitable. But UC faculty had already examined and rejected that claim. In January 2020, after a year-long review, a faculty task force had recommended keeping standardized testing requirements. The task force found that UC interpreted SAT scores holistically, taking into account applicants’ backgrounds, schools and opportunities. For many students who had faced adversity, standardized tests established eligibility when grades would not have been enough.
UC’s faculty governing body, the Assembly of the Academic Senate, voted 51-0 to adopt the task force’s recommendation. Then-UC President Janet Napolitano decided to eliminate the testing requirement anyway, and the regents reluctantly followed. Thus began UC’s admissions experiment: a systemwide policy change launched against the unanimous opposition of UC’s faculty.
Six years later, the experiment has run its course. The faculty task force was right. Napolitano was wrong. And the outcome is even worse than the task force predicted.
Having abandoned standardized testing requirements, UC now relies heavily on high school grades and essays. But grades have been inflated for years, and artificial intelligence has made essays a poor measure of unaided writing and reasoning. An admissions process without a universal quantitative measure is less reliable, less transparent and more vulnerable to human bias.
The consequences are visible in college classrooms. UC San Diego reported that entering students with math skills below high school level increased nearly thirtyfold in five years and roughly 1 in 12 had preparation below middle school benchmarks. At UC Berkeley, 20 to 30 percent of first-semester calculus students have displayed severe preparation deficits for three consecutive years.
Students who struggle with fractions are being asked, in the same semester, to learn far more complex concepts like limits, derivatives and Riemann integrals. Mathematics is like building a tower: Each level depends on the soundness of the one below. A student who has not mastered basic algebra is missing the load-bearing structure on which calculus depends.
Placing unprepared students into the same classroom as prepared ones puts brakes on the entire class. Our UC Berkeley calculus classes now have to pause to explain basic properties of addition and multiplication — for example, that (a+b) c = ac + bc. According to California’s Common Core standards, this material is taught in third grade.
The students most hurt are those the policy was supposed to help — first-generation, low-income and underrepresented students. Hiding preparation gaps does not remove them; it shifts them to the classroom, where they become harder to overcome. While weaker students drown in material they were never prepared to learn, stronger students tune out.
The administration has been trying to solve the STEM preparation problem by changing classroom expectations. Having declared progress toward equity in access, a 2025 report by the UC Office of the President on the future of STEM demands that “equity in access must be matched by equity in outcomes.”
If “equity in outcomes” means tutoring, bridge programs and summer preparation, faculty would welcome additional resources. But there are limits to what professors can reasonably address. When our schools fail to teach algebra in classrooms of 20 to 40 students over several years, a one-semester calculus course with more than 400 students will not work as a quick fix.
If “equity in outcomes” means we should pass students who have not mastered the course material, the result would be disastrous. California needs a more skilled workforce, not a less skilled one. Lowering standards would conceal failure, weaken STEM education and devalue a UC degree.
Recently, more than 2,100 UC STEM faculty signed an open letter — which I co-authored — calling for the restoration of standardized testing in UC admissions. A parallel letter from non-STEM faculty followed, and has already attracted more than 800 signatures.
A groundswell of this magnitude is rare. Faculty are raising an existential concern: The UC house is on fire. The test-blind process is locked in for at least the next admissions cycle, affecting hundreds of thousands of applicants. The urgency is heightened by the fact that many selective universities, including Harvard, MIT, Caltech, Princeton, Yale and Columbia, have restored or announced the restoration of standardized testing requirements. If UC remains test-blind, California risks losing even more top STEM talent, who will be readily identified and recruited by competing universities.
The University of California’s administration so far does not share this sense of urgency. While formally acknowledging concerns about student preparation, its practical response is to propose a 12-month process that “will investigate the advantages and disadvantages of relying on” the SAT, ACT and other tests, “as these tests may have evolved” since 2020. It “will provide recommendations about whether standardized tests should be used for admissions or not.”
The proposal amounts to spending 12 months replicating the work that the faculty task force has already done, with no new data and no clear justification for the do-over. This has the familiar look of delay by committee.
The regents — the stewards of the University of California — can cut through this runaround. They should acknowledge the failed test-blind experiment and reverse the misstep of 2020. The preservation of the world’s greatest public research university system, and the future of California’s students, are at stake.
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