Zvezdelina Stankova has taught mathematics at UC Berkeley for nearly three decades. But in 2023, while teaching introductory calculus for the first time since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, she noticed that something was quite wrong. The bottom 25 percent of students were not just struggling with the coursework, Stankova told me; “people were in freefall.” Teaching was becoming impossible. “With one hand, I am teaching a complex integral, and with the other hand, I am telling them how to solve a simple linear equation like 7x – 2 = 5,” Stankova said.
Mina Aganagic, a string theorist at Berkeley who has taught calculus for 20 years, noticed something similar. “I realized that for students to follow me,” she told me, “I had to start reviewing basic algebra stuff, like fractions.” The lack of mathematical fluency, Aganagic said, extended even to “the meaning of equals in an equation.” Both professors said their students came to office hours and still tried hard to pass—often by trying to commit equations to memory when they could not understand them. But however hard they worked, most of the students who arrived to calculus class without knowing algebra failed.
Stankova and Aganagic believed they knew why the bottom had fallen out of their calculus classes—and it wasn’t just that the coronavirus had disrupted their incoming students’ high-school math classes. The entire University of California system abandoned the use of standardized tests in admissions during the pandemic and, unlike many of its peer institutions, has neither restored their use nor announced any plans to do so.
Late last month, Stankova and Aganagic, along with three other Berkeley professors, published an open letter arguing for the reinstatement of those testing requirements—at least for any students seeking science, technology, engineering, and mathematics degrees. “Basic mathematical fluency is analogous to literacy; without it, success in university-level STEM becomes structurally unattainable for students,” they wrote. Their letter came only six months after UC San Diego released a shocking report finding that one in 12 of its incoming students struggled with even middle-school math. Since the letter’s publication, more than 1,400 professors and lecturers have co-signed it.
[Rose Horowitch: American kids can’t do math anymore]
In other words, a huge share of STEM and economics faculty across the UC system is now in open revolt—demanding that California’s public universities at least look at standardized-test scores before offering admission. The rupture was years in the making, after a policy change meant to promote equity collided with the practical realities of teaching calculus to students who struggle with basic algebra even at some of America’s premier scientific universities.
The UC-faculty rebellion may well succeed: David Volz, a professor at UC Riverside who chairs the faculty committee in charge of undergraduate admissions, told me that the system is setting up a working group to study whether to reinstate standardized-exam requirements. (Another working group will examine the high-school course requirements for admissions.) But any recommendations will likely take at least a year, leaving the university system in a bind.
The unending debates about standardized tests long ago became kabuki. They are not really about whether knowledge of trigonometry is latent classism, but about the trade-offs that selective universities are forced to make in balancing academic excellence with efforts to serve underprivileged applicants.
Supporters see tests such as the SAT as objective measures of academic preparation, allowing comparison between students no matter how varied their actual schooling. Tests can help identify the excellent students attending mediocre high schools and, conversely, the mediocre students attending excellent schools.
Rather than interpreting these gaps as a barometer of educational inequality, critics cast standardized tests as oppressive tools in their own right, because they reinforce inequality. Because the tests were correlated with privilege, the argument goes, they must simply be measures of privilege itself. Yet the same objection could be levied at all the other materials used in college admissions—high-school transcripts, essays, lists of extracurricular activities—which also favor students from wealthy, well-educated families.
Standardized tests are deeply entangled in the debate over affirmative action. Selective universities used race-based preferences in admissions to promote demographic diversity within their student body; these preferences were supposed to be small. But tests provided a quantitative measure for how large these preferences actually were.
UC was agonizing over standardized tests long before the pandemic. In January 2019, the system asked a faculty task force to study whether required exams such as the SAT and the ACT could be safely eliminated. In an exhaustive 227-page report a year later, the authors found that scores were “substantially” useful in predicting student outcomes, such as college GPA and graduation rates, better than relying on high-school GPA alone. This was true of disadvantaged students as well as privileged ones. The task force recommended that the university system keep its testing requirements; in April 2020, the UC academic senate unanimously concurred.
One month later, though, at the recommendation of Janet Napolitano, the former Arizona governor and Obama-administration official who was president of the UC system at the time, the Board of Regents voted unanimously to end the testing requirements. The minutes of that meeting recorded that Napolitano was “unpersuaded that the added value of the SAT/ACT outweighed all of UC’s mitigation measures employed to counteract the effect of the tests on certain populations, especially in light of the correlation between the tests and socioeconomic level and ethnicity.” (A later legal settlement with plaintiffs who deemed the SAT discriminatory committed the system to being test-blind until 2025.)
Even as UC bucked its faculty, it was moving in line with the rest of academia. The pandemic disruption to schooling arrived just as progressive concerns about equity were cresting. The confluence led many of America’s elite universities to announce that they were going either test-optional or totally test-blind—a temporary settlement that, amid the tumult of 2020, seemed destined for permanence.
Yet most top universities have since reversed their decision, leaving the UC system an outlier. When MIT reinstated its testing requirements in 2022, the university argued that student success was “significantly improved by considering standardized testing—especially in mathematics,” and that tests helped “identify academically prepared, socioeconomically disadvantaged students who could not otherwise demonstrate readiness.” Harvard followed suit in 2024; Stanford in 2025; Yale just last month.
[David Deming: The worst way to do college admissions]
Meanwhile, the broader political climate has changed. The diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives from the early days of the pandemic have receded in national importance after a strong backlash. Republicans in Washington are empowered—and eager—to investigate, embarrass, and punish the higher-education field. In January, spurred by the report at UC San Diego, Senator Bill Cassidy, the Republican chair of the Senate’s education committee, began an inquiry into low levels of math preparation in 35 selective American universities.
In 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court declared race-based affirmative action to be flatly unconstitutional. The lawsuits that had brought it down were challenges to admissions policies at Harvard and the University of North Carolina. Plaintiffs relied heavily on testing data to show discrimination against Asian American applicants. In California, race-based affirmative action has been formally banned since a ballot measure was passed in 1996. But America’s premier universities, both in California and elsewhere, which are committed to demographic balance, have tried many alternative admissions processes to maintain their representation of Black, Hispanic, and Native American students. Especially now that racial preferences are illegal nationwide, the presence of quantitative measures in every applicants’ file may present a risk to these mitigating procedures. Opponents of affirmative action, who suspect that the process is still continuing under other guises, could seek to replicate the winning strategy of the Harvard and UNC cases, if testing data show large, unexplainable gaps in academic preparation among different student groups.
These raging political debates help explain why the few hundred students who arrive at UC San Diego or UC Berkeley each year in need of remedial math instruction attract outsize attention. Skeptics of reinstating the SAT and the ACT, such as Pamela Burdman of the advocacy group Just Equations, point out that pandemic-induced learning loss caused declines in student performance. This is true. The latest National Assessment of Educational Progress scores—America’s gold-standard academic-achievement measures—showed that 45 percent of 12th graders were “below basic,” the worst performance recorded since 2005. In California, the share of high schoolers who take precalculus has declined from 46 percent in 2017 to just 33 percent in 2024; nearly 30 percent of high-school seniors are not taking any math course at all. The gap between the highest-performing and lowest-performing students has also grown larger over time.
Critics of testing reason that, if the pandemic was the cause of students’ problems, the SAT is not the solution. “It’s a little bit concerning—even frustrating—to see that the proposal seems to be bringing out the SAT and then somehow we can address the secular trend” of declining mathematical performance in high schoolers, Jonathan Glater, a law professor at Berkeley who has argued against the use of standardized tests, told me. “That’s what we would call a misdiagnosis.”
[Idrees Kahloon: America is sliding toward illiteracy]
Yet Berkeley and other selective universities should be less exposed to such trends because they are presumably drawing from the top of academic distribution—where performance has been as good as ever. And, if Berkeley is not, perhaps reinstating the test would allow it to be better at doing so. Grade inflation has, after all, eroded the signaling value of a strong high-school transcript: More than 25 percent of those taking UC San Diego’s remedial math course in 2024 had a 4.0 GPA in high-school math. Students’ weaknesses may not be coming through in other parts of their application. Essays, for example, can be greatly enhanced by artificial intelligence. Without proctored standardized tests, admissions risks becoming “a random draw out of a black box,” which “does not serve anybody,” Aganagic, the Berkeley string theorist, said. Many top American universities became test-optional early in the pandemic, allowing applicants to submit test scores if they believed this would help their chances. UC, however, went further and declined to consider exam scores altogether—ignoring information that might be useful both in admissions and in placement.
Selective universities must inherently sort. Math tests are very useful in sorting people based on mathematical ability. Yet people on all sides of the testing debate might be surprised to learn that, in most ways, abandoning standardized tests did not radically transform the UC system—either for better or for worse. A 2025 internal research report found that, despite the purported harms to equity caused by the testing regime, removing the tests had hardly changed the racial mix of students. At the same time, overall graduation rates have held steady. In a foreshadowing of today’s problems, though, the report did detect a slight decline in GPA for STEM degrees, as well as a drop in college-continuation rates for students with high-school GPAs below 3.0.
All these data cut in different directions: They suggest that reinstating testing would be neither a catastrophe—decimating the share of Black and Hispanic students—nor a panacea for academic underperformance. The UC system serves a huge number of students outside its flagship campuses. Still, students who struggle with fractions should probably not enroll in calculus at an institution such as Berkeley; standardized tests would help avert that. But the larger background problem—that more and more American high-school students graduate without even basic mathematical competency—is one that standardized tests will not be able to fix. They can only measure it.
The post The University of California System’s SAT Folly appeared first on The Atlantic.
