UC STEM Professors Demand SAT/ACT Return After Failed “Equity” Experiment

More than 800 University of California faculty members, including a majority of mathematics department chairs across the UC system, have signed an open letter (see below) to the UC Board of Regents, UC Office of the President, Academic Senate leadership, and the people of California demanding the reinstatement of SAT/ACT mathematics scores as a requirement for admission to STEM majors beginning with the 2027 admissions cycle.

The letter, titled “Open Letter from UC STEM Faculty,” warns that the UC system’s 2020 decision to eliminate standardized testing, initially justified as a temporary COVID-19 measure and later made permanent in the name of “equity,” has produced a widening crisis in student preparedness. 

Professors report they are now forced to reteach middle-school level mathematics in university STEM classrooms while attempting to deliver college-level calculus, engineering, and other quantitatively rigorous coursework.

Citing a November 2025 report from the UC San Diego Senate-Administration Workgroup on Admissions, the faculty note that the number of incoming students whose mathematics skills fall below high-school level has increased nearly thirtyfold since the test-optional policy took effect. 

Moreover, roughly 70 percent of those students are performing at or below middle-school levels, “reaching roughly one in twelve members of the entering cohort.” Data from UC Berkeley shows that 20-30 percent of first-semester calculus students who took diagnostic tests displayed “severe preparation deficits,” despite arriving with strong high-school GPAs.

The letter states: “Basic mathematical fluency is analogous to literacy; without it, success in university-level STEM becomes structurally unattainable for students.” 

It continues: “The SAT 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.”

As the California Globe has long reported, the UC system’s shift away from objective standardized testing was explicitly framed as an equity initiative. 

In 2020, the UC Academic Senate and Regents eliminated the SAT/ACT requirement, arguing the tests were “biased” against underrepresented and low-income students and that high-school GPAs would provide a fairer measure of merit. The state’s 2021 California Math Framework delayed algebra instruction and injected social justice concepts at the expense of mastery.

We have also covered repeated attempts by UC campuses and the Academic Senate to skirt Proposition 209 through race-conscious admissions schemes, DEI mandates in faculty hiring (later scaled back), and the erosion of merit-based selection at elite public schools such as San Francisco’s Lowell High School.

Our ongoing coverage highlighted UC San Diego’s adoption of new selection criteria for competitive majors that award points explicitly for Pell Grant eligibility and first-generation status, effectively discriminating on the basis of parental income and education level rather than academic readiness. 

These policies, combined with severe grade inflation in California public schools, has led to the admission of students unprepared for UC’s rigorous STEM programs.

We warned that such policies undermine true social mobility, waste taxpayer resources on remedial instruction, and threaten California’s position as a global leader in science, technology, and innovation.

The faculty letter echoes reinforces these concerns: “The current admissions system is undermining this structure by admitting students directly into STEM UC programs without a reliable measure of whether they are well prepared to succeed,” the professors write. “This serves no one well.”

The signatories, which include seven of nine UC mathematics department chairs and dozens of chairs from other STEM disciplines, call for four concrete actions:

1. Reinstate SAT/ACT mathematics requirements for STEM-intensive majors effective 2027.  
2. Use these scores as a common measure of basic readiness to counter inconsistent high-school grades.  
3. Establish STEM faculty oversight of readiness standards and admissions policies affecting those majors.  
4. Mandate institutional accountability by testing admissions criteria against actual student outcomes.

The professors emphasize that other leading STEM institutions have already resumed using standardized tests, while UC’s own 2020 Standardized Testing Task Force had warned against permanent elimination.

The California Globe will continue to monitor the UC Regents’ response and any forthcoming action by the Academic Senate’s Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools, which is scheduled to discuss system-wide admissions policy in the coming days.