UC abruptly suspends plan to reconsider SAT in admissions

The University of California admissions board has voted to rescind - for now - its plan to study whether to resume SAT or ACT requirements in admissions, a move that leaves the direction of one of the university's most closely watched debates unclear a day before the Board of Regents meets in San Francisco.

UC's Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools, known as BOARS, announced last month that it would convene two work groups through next year: one to weigh the role of standardized tests in admissions, the other to reexamine high school course requirements for acceptance to UC.

At a Friday meeting, the board voted to pull back on the plan, and the links that explained it - which appeared on the UC website late last week - have been removed. There is no replacement plan as of yet, according to two members of the board who attended the meeting, and several UC professors who are aware of the decision and who have been advocating either for or against testing requirements.

The decision shelves, possibly for months, a process UC said would be a careful, evidence-driven review that was praised by UC President James B. Milliken as "comprehensive."

It is unclear why the plan was suspended. A UC spokesperson and the chair of the admissions board, UC Riverside professor David Volz, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The plan had faced criticism on multiple fronts - and cast UC in the national spotlight over the use of high-stakes standardized testing in college admissions.

UC went test-optional in 2020 and later test-free after a unanimous regent vote rooted in part in concerns that the test screened out students of color who often lacked test prep resources and that scores correlated too heavily to race and family wealth than readiness.

UC - the nation's most prominent public university system - stands all but alone among elite institutions in maintaining test-free admissions. Many of the private universities it competes with, including all Ivy League schools, Stanford and Caltech, have reinstated the testing requirements suspended over COVID-era disruptions or racial equity concerns.

Faculty outcry that first-year STEM students were severely deficient in math skills built up over months before the admissions board in June said it would study re-instating the UC test policy. If tests were again required, the earliest the policy would have taken effect was the fall 2028 application cycle, the plan stated. Some faculty argued the university was moving too slowly.

Others, including those opposed to reinstating testing requirements, said UC officials would have little data to look at about how using test scores related to the preparation levels of students who enroll, and argued that standardized tests' correlation to wealth and race could shut students out of opportunities at UC.

Concerns over timing of reversal

The timing has unsettled some faculty. Michael Stryker, a UCSF physiology professor and BOARS member, said the interval between the board's reversal on Friday and the regents' July 14-15 meeting was so short that it could cause confusion.

"I can see the regents being surprised that what they read in the newspapers about the testing debate is no longer true," Stryker said. The professor declined to reveal details of the committee's deliberations that led it to cancel its plans. The admissions board posts public minutes on its website, but those take at least weeks to be uploaded after a meeting.

UC had carefully laid out the road map: One work group would have investigated "the advantages and disadvantages" of relying on SAT and ACT scores and California's 11th-grade Smarter Balanced assessment.

A second group was to examine whether the 15 high school courses required to get into a UC campus "may be overly prescriptive/rigid" and whether they address "changing workforce needs, widespread adoption of AI, UC faculty concerns about preparation" and shifts in how students learn. The regents are scheduled to discuss the course requirements Wednesday in a public session.

Any changes would have required regents' approval. A decision on either of the issues was not scheduled for this week's meetings.

Next steps uncertain

With the plan removed, it is unclear what UC will do next.

Stryker, who said the board is not scheduled to meet again until the fall, emphasized that it still holds power over admissions matters and could re-evaluate testing concerns later.

"I cannot imagine they will not address the issues that prompted the road map later this year," said Stryker, who is moving off the board and said there would be additional turnover by the new academic year. "But BOARS can then act much more rapidly if it chooses to do so."

Zvezdelina Stankova, a UC Berkeley math professor who is among those who gathered more than 3,000 STEM and humanities faculty signatures in open letters supporting testing published since last month, was blunt about the discarded road map. The two work groups, she said, "were a way to delay making a decision," and a straightforward recommendation - SAT or no SAT - should have been shared with UC's Academic Senate before working its way up to the regents. "It is better late than never to take the right move," she said.

Stankova said she and colleagues wrote to regents in recent days asking the board "to publicly commit at this meeting to place a restoration of the SAT/ACT on the September 2026 agenda as an action item," effective for the fall 2027 application cycle.

Stryker argued the now-abandoned study was structurally incapable of producing useful evidence.

Because UC largely stopped collecting test scores after 2020, he wrote in a message to fellow board members that he shared with The Times, there is no comparable applicant group on which to validate today's tests.

"In the absence of sound data," Stryker wrote, the testing work group "will have little to do but debate the politics of testing." He said the board should recommend restoring standardized testing for fall 2027 admissions and study its effects over four years, using methods UC used when it last evaluated testing in 2020.

That year, a faculty committee produced hundreds of pages of analysis that ultimately recommended UC continue using the SAT and ACT in admissions. The committee agreed with SAT critics that the test correlated to race and wealth, but it noted that similar patterns were seen in grade-point average and other academic measures, and that the comprehensive and holistic admissions evaluations used by UC campuses accounted for such disparities.

The regents, with the support of then-UC President Janet Napolitano, voted unanimously in May 2020 to end testing requirements and said UC should study the feasibility of creating its own standardized test. A separate faculty committee later said it was unfeasible for UC to develop its own test in the short timeline that was needed.

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