The University of Californias ideological crusade against standardized testing is colliding with hard evidence from its own classrooms, where thousands of professors now warn that equity policies have produced incoming students who lack even basic math skills.
As reported by The Gateway Pundit, the UC system abandoned SAT and ACT requirements in 2020, first going test-optional during COVID and then fully test-blind, after regents claimed the exams were discriminatory toward minority and low-income applicants. This was done despite the UC Academic Senates own Standardized Testing Task Force finding that the SAT and ACT were strong predictors of college success and actually helped identify talented disadvantaged students who might otherwise have been overlooked, a warning that was brushed aside in favor of progressive ideology.
Now, more than 3,000 UC faculty members, including STEM professors and department chairs, have signed open letters demanding the restoration of standardized tests, according to the LA Times. At UC San Diego, a faculty report found that in just five years there has been a nearly 30-fold increase in freshmen whose math skills test below high school level, with 70% of those students fall below middle school levels, reaching roughly one in twelve members of the entering cohort.
At UC Berkeley, math professor Zvezdelina Stankova recounted calculus students struggling with the simple equation 7x 5 = 9, a stunning indictment of the systems lowered standards. Faculty warn that the test-blind regime has flooded classrooms with unprepared students, drained teaching resources, and threatens the value of UC degrees, and even former UC President Janet Napolitano now concedes the six-year experiment needs to be revisited.
In a detailed letter, UC mathematics faculty wrote, We call for the reinstatement of the SAT/ACT mathematics requirement for applicants to STEM majors beginning with the 2027 admissions cycle, alongside STEM faculty oversight of readiness standards and admissions practices affecting those majors. They report a widening divergence in mathematical preparation levels within the same classroom, forcing instructors to reteach middle-school mathematics while simultaneously teaching the material students need for sciences, engineering, economics, and other quantitatively demanding fields.
The professors stress that basic mathematical fluency is analogous to literacy; without it, success in university-level STEM becomes structurally unattainable for students. They argue that UCs finite resources are being stretched to the breaking point and that the widening spread between underprepared and well-prepared students creates polarized courses, weakening the foundation available to many students and making it harder to teach at the level required for advanced STEM work.
The letter bluntly links the crisis to the 2020 elimination of standardized tests, calling it a temporary measure that has now become a permanent vulnerability. The faculty note that the STTF report had warned that removing the SAT/ACT would eliminate a vital predictor of college success and obscure the impact of severe high-school grade inflation, and they point out that all other leading STEM institutions, including the UCs primary peers, have resumed using SAT/ACT in their admissions to ensure foundational fluency.
Contrary to left-wing talking points, the signatories insist that the SAT/ACT mathematics requirement is not an obstacle to equity; rather, it is a prerequisite for it. Failing to measure preparation gaps does not remove barriers; it moves them into the classroom, where they become harder to overcome, they write, adding that an admissions process that ignores foundational readiness does a disservice to the most vulnerable students.
The faculty warn that current metrics based primarily on GPA and essays are unreliable in an era of severe grade inflation and AI-assisted application essays, and they formally call on UC to reinstate SAT/ACT requirements, validate academic readiness, establish faculty oversight, and mandate institutional accountability. Their message is clear: Obscuring preparation gaps harms both students individually and the University collectively, and only by restoring objective standards can UC preserve the standards that make a UC STEM degree meaningful and maintain Californias scientific and economic leadership in a competitive global marketplace.
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