- UC STEM admissions have produced severe math gaps, with faculty forced to reteach middle school content in university classrooms.
- More than 600 UC faculty are demanding UC STEM admissions require SAT or ACT scores again, starting fall 2027.
- UC San Diego data shows a roughly 30-fold increase in incoming students testing below high school math level since 2020.
- Elite universities including Harvard, Stanford, and Caltech have already restored standardized testing requirements for applicants.
- UC STEM admissions have produced severe math gaps, with faculty forced to reteach middle school content in university classrooms.
- More than 600 UC faculty are demanding UC STEM admissions require SAT or ACT scores again, starting fall 2027.
- UC San Diego data shows a roughly 30-fold increase in incoming students testing below high school math level since 2020.
- Elite universities including Harvard, Stanford, and Caltech have already restored standardized testing requirements for applicants.
When UC STEM Admissions Dropped the SAT, Something Broke
UC STEM admissions have been running without standardized test scores for six years now — and according to more than 600 University of California faculty members, the results are a quiet disaster. The faculty, led by mathematicians at UC Berkeley, have sent an open letter to UC system leadership demanding the reinstatement of SAT or ACT requirements for STEM applicants by fall 2027. Their message is blunt: without a reliable measure of math readiness at the gate, professors are spending precious lecture time re-teaching algebra to students who are supposed to be learning calculus.
This isn’t a fringe complaint from a handful of disgruntled professors. The letter carries over 600 signatures, and it arrives backed by hard data. A UC San Diego Academic Senate work group report published in November documented a roughly 30-fold increase between 2020 and 2025 in incoming first-year students whose math skills tested below high school level — and 70% of those students scored below middle school standards. Let that sink in. Students enrolled in UC STEM admissions pathways who can’t yet do middle school math.
What Faculty Are Actually Seeing in Classrooms
Zvezda Stankova, a teaching professor in Berkeley’s mathematics department and one of the letter’s lead organizers, put it plainly when describing a spring 2023 Calculus II class — one that stood out across her nearly three decades of teaching. “Something had changed drastically,” she said. “The bottom was taken out, and there were 25 to 30% of the students who were in free fall. There was nothing you could do for them. They were just not prepared.”
That kind of classroom experience is showing up in the numbers, too. Over three consecutive years — fall 2021 through fall 2023 — diagnostic exams given to Berkeley first-semester calculus students consistently found that at least 20% of students had identifiable math deficits. The faculty letter frames it starkly: “Basic mathematical fluency is analogous to literacy; without it, success in university-level STEM becomes structurally unattainable for students.” It’s hard to argue with that framing. You can’t scaffold physics on a foundation that isn’t there.
The letter asks for two things: reinstate SAT or ACT testing for UC STEM admissions starting fall 2027, and give STEM faculty formal oversight of readiness standards in their own majors. That second ask is interesting — it suggests faculty feel they’ve been cut out of a conversation that directly affects their classrooms.
How UC STEM Admissions Got Here
The backstory matters. In May 2020, UC regents voted unanimously to suspend SAT and ACT requirements, with plans to eliminate them entirely by 2025. The decision was framed as an equity move — the tests, critics argued, disadvantaged students of color and those from lower-income families who couldn’t afford prep courses or attended under-resourced schools. It was a bold call, and at the time it had real moral weight.
Except the UC’s own research didn’t fully support it. The Academic Senate’s Standardized Testing Task Force had actually concluded that test scores could boost admission rates for students from disadvantaged backgrounds — partly because they can compensate for grade inflation at better-resourced schools. The task force also found that test scores outperformed high school grades as predictors of college academic performance, even though UC weighted grades more heavily in admissions decisions. The regents voted against their own researchers’ recommendations.
Then a California state court issued an injunction in 2020, forcing UC to stop using scores even earlier than planned. COVID-19 piled on: campuses nationwide dropped testing requirements in the chaos of the pandemic, giving the whole trend a sense of inevitability. For UC, test-free admissions went from a temporary pandemic measure to a permanent policy remarkably fast. The downstream consequences for UC STEM admissions specifically were not fully anticipated at the time.
The Rest of Higher Ed Has Moved On — Back to Testing
Here’s where UC looks increasingly like an outlier. The pandemic-era testing moratorium at elite institutions has largely ended. Harvard, Brown, Dartmouth, the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford, and Caltech all restored standardized testing requirements for applicants in 2024 or 2025. MIT never dropped them. USC remains test-optional but at least considers scores as part of its process.
UC’s current policy — shared with California State University — allows applicants to submit scores, but only after admissions decisions have already been made, strictly for course placement. That’s essentially using the SAT as a triage tool after the fact, rather than a filter at the front door. It tells you where to put a student, not whether they’re ready for the program they’ve already been accepted into. When peer institutions are restoring test requirements, UC STEM admissions policy stands out as an increasingly isolated exception.
That’s a meaningful distinction. A student placed into a remedial math course after arriving at UC San Diego isn’t getting the STEM education they enrolled for. They’re catching up to where they should have been before they applied.
The Equity Argument Cuts Both Ways
Stankova is keenly aware her letter will take fire. “Our letter is going to be attacked from all sides,” she acknowledged. The equity critique of standardized testing is real and shouldn’t be dismissed — there’s genuine evidence that test prep access correlates with household income, and that certain question formats disadvantage non-native English speakers.
But Stankova and her colleagues are making a counter-argument that deserves equal scrutiny: admitting underprepared students into STEM programs without adequate support isn’t equity — it’s setting them up to fail. If 25-30% of students in a calculus class are in academic free fall with no realistic path to recovery, who does that serve? The students? The professor? It’s a painful question, but an honest one. UC STEM admissions criteria exist precisely to ensure students can succeed once they arrive — not merely to fill seats.
The UC Academic Senate’s own 2020 task force reached a similar conclusion. Test scores, used thoughtfully alongside other factors, can actually surface strong students from weak high schools who might otherwise be overlooked because their GPA doesn’t shine as brightly as a student from a well-funded private school. Eliminating that signal entirely doesn’t remove bias — it just makes the remaining signals harder to interpret.
What Happens Next in UC STEM Admissions Policy
The faculty letter landed just ahead of a scheduled discussion by the UC Academic Senate’s Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools — a forum that could mark the beginning of a formal policy review. UC leadership hasn’t endorsed the letter, but the response from Ahmet Palazoglu, chair of the UC systemwide Academic Senate, suggests the pressure is being felt. He confirmed he has heard faculty concerns about student preparedness and has called on the admissions board to address “timely topics tied to students’ college readiness.”
UC spokesperson Rachel Zaentz offered a more measured response, saying the system “will continue to focus on strengthening instruction, collaboration and support” for math readiness alongside K-12 partners. That framing — fix the pipeline, not the gate — is politically safer, but it doesn’t address the immediate problem sitting in front of Stankova and her colleagues every semester.
The faculty are asking for fall 2027 as the implementation date if testing is restored. That gives UC roughly a year to make a decision and another year for applicants to prepare. Whether the system’s leadership has the appetite for a fight over UC STEM admissions standards — in California, in 2026 — is a different question entirely. But if the math crisis data continues to compound, the faculty letter may prove harder to ignore than the regents would prefer.
