The University of California's Academic Senate announced Thursday that a formal faculty committee will investigate whether to reinstate SAT and ACT requirements in freshman admissions — the first institutional step on a faculty revolt that has drawn more than 1,400 signatures from professors who say too many students arrive unable to handle college-level math.

UC dropped the SAT and ACT as requirements in 2020. Now, a work group housed in the system's Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools will weigh the advantages and disadvantages of bringing standardized tests back — focusing particularly on STEM admissions, where math faculty say preparation has fallen sharply. Any change would require approval from UC's Board of Regents and couldn't take effect earlier than fall 2028, but the debate is already exposing a genuine fracture inside the UC faculty over what ails the system's math pipeline and who bears the cost of fixing it.

The announcement came as UC Berkeley math professor Zvezdelina Stankova described a scene that has become something of a rallying symbol for the reinstatement movement: a group of first-year students in her calculus office hours last fall who struggled with a middle school algebra problem — solving for x from the equation 7x – 5 = 9.

"I told everyone to drop their pens and watch," Stankova told EdSource. "We had to go through it step by step."

The anecdote has circulated widely in UC faculty circles, and it tracks with a more systematic picture: a fall 2025 report from a UC San Diego committee found "a steep decline in the academic preparation" of incoming first-year students, documenting that roughly one in eight fall 2025 UC San Diego freshmen scored below high school level on the campus's math placement exam.

Math faculty from across the system gathered at UC Davis in April to debate the UCSD findings. A majority supported reinstating tests, though not unanimously. Weeks later, five UC Berkeley professors drafted an open letter calling for standardized tests to be required for freshman STEM applicants. As of this week, 1,427 faculty have signed — including seven of UC's nine math department chairs.

Stankova, one of the letter's authors, argues that without test scores, there's no objective signal of math readiness. Grade inflation makes GPAs harder to interpret, she told EdSource, and the proliferation of AI means admissions essays can't be fully trusted either. "So with that, there is no objective measure for math readiness," she said.

The case against

Not everyone agrees the tests are the answer — or that the problem is as acute as the UCSD report suggests.

Bjorn Birnir, the math department chair at UC Santa Barbara and one of two UC math chairs who did not sign the open letter, convened his department's undergraduate committee and found a majority opposed. He told EdSource that the fix should come earlier in the pipeline, not at the admissions gate.

"All it will do is keep students out of mathematics, and it may push some students, especially underrepresented students, out of the UC system," Birnir said.

His position is backed by recent research. A fall 2025 report by Saul Geiser, a senior researcher at UC Berkeley's Center for Studies in Higher Education, found that high school grades predict first-year college success more reliably than test scores. The same study documented that ranking applicants by SAT scores disproportionately disadvantages Black, Latino, low-income and first-generation students — and that UC has enrolled more of those students in the years since it dropped the testing requirement.

What comes next

The work group will include mostly faculty but also representatives from UC's systemwide president's office, the California State Board of Education, and campus-level admissions staff. It will examine both the SAT/ACT and 11th-grade Smarter Balanced scores — California's statewide assessment administered in grades 3 through 8 and again in 11th grade — as potential admissions criteria.

Academic Senate Chair Ahmet Palazoglu framed the review in terms of student outcome: "I know we want every student admitted to UC to make the most of their college education. Our responsibility is to ensure that our policies and practices make that possible," he wrote to Senate faculty Thursday.

UC's peer institutions have already moved. Stanford, Caltech, and several Ivy League universities have reinstated test requirements after pandemic-era suspensions. If UC follows, it would be a significant reversal for a system that was a national leader in the move to test-optional admissions six years ago — one that is now being asked to reckon with what that shift did, and didn't, accomplish.