The fight over whether the University of California should bring back the SAT has narrowed to a single, unglamorous question: what do UC's own math diagnostics actually prove? Within one week this month, a Berkeley calculus professor and the San Francisco Chronicle gave readers two irreconcilable answers.

For more than a year, thousands of UC faculty have argued that test-blind admissions are seating students in calculus lecture halls who can't handle middle-school arithmetic. That much has been reported. What's new is that the empirical case underneath the campaign is now openly contested — by UC's own researchers, using UC's own data — and both sides have taken the fight public. It matters because the Academic Senate won't rule on restoring the SAT until June 2027, so the argument over the numbers, not any vote, is what's shaping the debate right now.

On Aug. 12, the San Francisco Chronicle's Jill Tucker published a lengthy examination of the faculty campaign that asked, in effect, whether UC is really seating students who can't handle college math — and concluded the professors' alarm outruns their evidence↗ (external source, opens in a new tab).

Her central witness was Jesse Rothstein, who teaches public policy and economics at Berkeley and said he saw little reason to think readopting the test would move outcomes at all. The story rested on a 2025 UC study of the 2021 and 2022 freshman classes, which reported that first-year GPAs, retention, graduation rates and completed course units all held roughly steady after the testing requirement disappeared.

Tucker also pressed on the two data sets the faculty lean on hardest. The UC San Diego placement report, she noted, covers years in which that campus grew its first-year class by 30% and roughly doubled its share of students from high-poverty high schools — from 12.6% to 24.6% between 2021 and 2024. Those students consistently accounted for more than half of everyone placed in remedial math. Read that way, the paper argued, the numbers may capture a deliberate choice to widen access, not a collapse triggered by dropping the test.

Three days later, one of the campaign's leaders answered in print. Writing an opinion piece for the SF Standard on Aug. 15, Berkeley math professor Zvezdelina Stankova accused the Chronicle of misreading the Berkeley diagnostic. The paper had reported that 48% of students were prepared for Calculus I before 2020 and suggested readiness held up under test-blind admissions. That, Stankova wrote flatly, is incorrect.

Her rebuttal turns on definitions. The faculty analysis, she wrote, counts a student as calculus-ready only if they clear seven or eight of eight diagnostic topics — a threshold she says fell to 26% by 2023. Her larger claim is about shape rather than averages: the middle of the distribution hollowed out, 17% of tested students got none of the eight topics right, and the single most common score became zero. The lecture hall, she wrote, effectively split into two courses taught at once — one in college calculus, one in the remedial math nobody had scheduled.

The professors are no fringe. Per UC Berkeley's College of Letters & Science↗ (external source, opens in a new tab), an open letter started by five Berkeley faculty gathered more than 1,450 signatures within weeks; the Chronicle put the systemwide tally above 3,000 of roughly 26,000 faculty. Yet the same account carries a detail that complicates the tidy "test-blind broke math" story: the campus began responding before the policy took hold, with lecturer-designed summer precalculus courses launched in 2020. Professor Alexander Paulin described students who arrive overwhelmed by Calculus I and finish the year among the strongest in Calculus II — what he called a long game.

There is also a constituency the faculty letter talks past. The UC Student Association, which represents some 237,000 undergraduates, told the Regents in July it holds "deep concern" that reinstating the exams would narrow access, citing the well-documented tie between scores and family income.

None of this settles who is right. It sharpens what's genuinely in dispute: not whether some UC students struggle with math — everyone agrees they do — but whether the SAT would tell campuses anything they don't already know, and whether the charts being carried to the Regents measure preparation or simply measure who UC decided to admit. That is the question the Senate has given itself until 2027 to answer, and the one both sides are now litigating in the open, one op-ed at a time.