The debate over whether the University of California should restore the SAT in admissions, expected to surface next week before regents, is emerging as one of its most closely watched and consequential issues as leaders assess how the nation’s premier public university decides who gets a coveted seat.
There are early signs that views may have changed in the six years since the governing board unanimously voted to eliminate SAT and ACT requirements. One of the most significant: Former UC President Janet Napolitano, who was at UC’s helm at the time, says a hard reassessment is much needed after a faculty outcry that students are severely deficient in math skills.
A standardized test score “shouldn’t be a sole factor” in determining access to UC, Napolitano said, but a renewed look at admissions could conclude it should be “a factor.”
She and others spoke to the high stakes of the decision amid a supercharged political climate in which the Trump administration has opened multiple investigations into UC admission practices for alleged racial discrimination.
“It’s been a six-year experiment, and it now needs to be revisited,” Napolitano said in an interview with The Times. The former president, who successfully pushed to end the requirement in 2020, said the racial and class equity logic that drove that decision deserves a second look. “It’s not like the SAT erases those inequities, but it’s not like the SAT adds to those inequities.”
UC leaders have shown a distinct willingness to take on the issue amid changes at the highest echelon of university decision-makers since 2020. A new UC president, James Milliken, took over a year ago. The Board of Regents has turned over substantially, with newer appointees now in the majority. Five of UC’s nine undergraduate campuses also have new chancellors.
The debate comes as UC increasingly stands as a national outlier in its refusal to consider SAT and ACT scores. A growing number of prestigious universities — including Stanford, Harvard and Yale — and public university systems in Tennessee, Georgia and Texas have reinstated testing made optional during the pandemic. Others, including USC and the California State University system, remain test-optional or test-free.
UC Berkeley Chancellor Rich Lyons, whose campus math faculty are at the center of the push, declined to predict where consensus would land, but spoke to the work ahead.
“Is the SAT or ACT or standardized testing a silver bullet for making admissions better? No way, nobody’s suggesting it is,” he said. The real challenge, he said, is “making sure that people can write as well as we need them to write to get a degree here, and can do the kind of math that will get them into calculus, if what they want to do involves calculus.”
UC announced June 11 that it would reconsider the SAT after roughly 1,400 faculty members in science, technology, engineering and math fields signed an open letter saying that first-year students were arriving in UC classrooms unprepared and many needed to learn middle school math concepts. An additional 1,600, including those in humanities, social sciences and arts, later joined to argue that verbal reasoning and writing skills were lacking too.
If the tests are reinstated, the policy would not take effect until the fall 2028 application period at the earliest. Faculty say it’s too long.
Although the regents’ July 14-15 meeting agenda does not explicitly note an SAT discussion, the subject is all but certain to surface in public comment. Faculty activists are pressing UC to hold formal talks and speed up the timeline.
A charged political climate
When UC rejected the SAT, leaders contended that the test screened out students of color who often lacked test prep resources and that scores correlated more to race and family wealth than readiness.
Regents overruled a faculty task force, which had found the tests to be predictive of college success across demographics and recommended keeping them. UC also settled a lawsuit filed by students who said pandemic conditions made testing nearly impossible for applicants with disabilities and that the test had discriminatory effects against those who were not white. That agreement expired in 2025.
Napolitano cautioned that the SAT is no cure for the preparedness gap faculty describe. The test, she said, “is just a snapshot; it doesn’t say what a student has actually learned.”
The Trump administration opposes university diversity, equity and inclusion programs and has elevated test scores as a primary admissions yardstick of merit as it accuses elite universities, including UC, of breaking the law by giving advantages to Black and Latino applicants. UC has denied the charges.
“Anti-DEI groups now feel they have a larger voice than they did before,” said Kim Wilcox, who stepped down as UC Riverside chancellor last year and supports resuming use of the tests.
Advocates for underserved students have not ruled out a repeat of lawsuits if the tests return.
Public Counsel attorney Mark Rosenbaum, who represented students in the earlier suit, sees a connection between federal pressure and UC’s reconsideration.
“The UC system may well be knuckling under to Trump,” he said.
The government is indeed watching: Multiple UC faculty who have shared comments about the SAT debate on X say Harmeet Dhillon, the Department of Justice’s top civil rights attorney, has liked their posts.
UC officials say they are treading carefully, knowing their debate on testing could later be turned against the university.
They point to how a UC settlement roughly a year ago with Jewish faculty and students who sued over a UCLA pro-Palestinian encampment was cited by the Justice Department to fault the university for allegedly tolerating antisemitism. In addition, the Trump administration cited a UCLA report on antisemitism as proof of campus discrimination.
Shaun Harper, a USC education professor, warned that restoring the tests would hand the White House a fresh weapon to portray UC as illegally practicing affirmative action. “Too many institutions have become the targets of the Trump administration, and this will further exacerbate that,” he said.
Leaning on her experience as a former U.S. Homeland Security secretary and Arizona governor, Napolitano agreed.
“A risk is that the Trump administration will weaponize SAT scores,” Napolitano said, evaluating “university admission solely on the basis of, ‘Did you admit the students with the highest scores, regardless of any other factor?’ … and make accusations based on that.” But, she noted, California law has barred UC from considering race for nearly two decades.
UC officials reject the idea that Washington is driving the review.
David Volz, chair of the UC Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools and a UC Riverside professor, said that White House pressure “never came into consideration,” and that faculty concerns had been “bubbling to the surface” well before Trump took office.
Two work groups will lead the review. One will weigh whether to require the SAT, ACT or the Smarter Balanced test that California gives public school students. The other will reexamine the high school course requirements for UC admissions. Regents will approve or reject any recommended changes.
Ahmet Palazoglu, the UC Academic Senate chair and a UC Davis chemical engineering professor, said “the review will go well beyond previous work on this subject because much has changed across the education landscape since the UC Board of Regents adopted its test-blind undergraduate admissions policy.”
Changed classrooms
Because UC largely stopped collecting scores after 2020, faculty have no systemwide data linking admitted students’ classroom readiness to test performance. Many argue from memory, recalling their students’ skills before the tests were eliminated. UC San Diego and UC Berkeley faculty have released data on weaker first-year student math skills based on classroom assessments. Pro-SAT professors say UC risks falling behind schools that have already reinstated testing.
Zvezdelina Stankova, one of the Berkeley math professors leading the SAT push, described engineering students who came to her office hours unable to solve basic algebra, some having skipped Calculus 1 on the strength of high AP scores. “With one hand I would teach a complicated integral, and with the other hand I’m teaching them how to write a solution to a simple linear equation like 7x − 5 = 9,” she said.
Critics say the classroom alarms miss the broader picture of student success.
UC first-year student retention has held at about 92% since the tests were dropped and four-year graduation rates have increased — from 71% in 2020 to 74% this year — said Jessie Ryan, president of the Campaign for College Opportunity. Resuming SAT would be “the wrong approach to an undefined problem,” she said.
Eddie Comeaux, a UC Riverside professor who chaired the system’s admissions board in 2020 when it recommended keeping the tests, said a committee had “significant” divisions on testing even though it ultimately favored it.
“It’s not whether or not standardized tests are good or bad,” he said. “The question has always been about what we are doing as an educational system to prepare those students who might be less resourced.”
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