The Atlantic is pretty late to this particular party. Both David and I have been writing about this topic since last fall. In any case, they published a story yesterday titled, “The University of California System’s SAT Folly.”‘
Zvezdelina Stankova has taught mathematics at UC Berkeley for nearly three decades. But in 2023, while teaching introductory calculus for the first time since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, she noticed that something was quite wrong. The bottom 25 percent of students were not just struggling with the coursework, Stankova told me; “people were in freefall.” Teaching was becoming impossible. “With one hand, I am teaching a complex integral, and with the other hand, I am telling them how to solve a simple linear equation like 7x – 2 = 5,” Stankova said.
Mina Aganagic, a string theorist at Berkeley who has taught calculus for 20 years, noticed something similar. “I realized that for students to follow me,” she told me, “I had to start reviewing basic algebra stuff, like fractions.” The lack of mathematical fluency, Aganagic said, extended even to “the meaning of equals in an equation.” Both professors said their students came to office hours and still tried hard to pass—often by trying to commit equations to memory when they could not understand them. But however hard they worked, most of the students who arrived to calculus class without knowing algebra failed.
The obvious question, the one that anyone would ask, is why? And the answer to that question is no mystery. The UC system did away with SATs, not simply making them optional but forbidding students to submit them.
That is the practical explanation for why many incoming UC students can’t do high school (or middle school) math, but it’s not the final explanation. It doesn’t explain the motive behind the decision to ditch the SAT. To his credit, the author doesn’t dodge the real explanation.
The rupture was years in the making, after a policy change meant to promote equity collided with the practical realities of teaching calculus to students who struggle with basic algebra even at some of America’s premier scientific universities…
Standardized tests are deeply entangled in the debate over affirmative action. Selective universities used race-based preferences in admissions to promote demographic diversity within their student body; these preferences were supposed to be small. But tests provided a quantitative measure for how large these preferences actually were.
I wrote about this last November when a UC Berkeley professor wrote an opinion piece for Inside Higher Ed rejecting the need for the SAT. As Saul Geiser sees it, the decision to drop the SAT has been a good one because now there are more Black and Hispanic students at UC schools.
At the top of the applicant pool— where the chance of admission is greatest—Latinos and Blacks comprised 23 percent of the top GPA tier but only 5 percent of the top SAT tier. Similar differences were found for low-income and first-generation applicants. Far from leveling the playing field, the SAT steepens the climb.
As I argued at the time, this does not prove that GPA is a better metric for admissions, only that it is easier to get A’s than to get high SAT scores.
Schools and even individual teachers within schools grade classes differently, especially in the wake of the pandemic. Some schools and teachers give out A’s like candy and do their best not to fail anyone. Other schools and teachers are much more competitive and actually make kids work pretty hard for top grades.
And it’s not just the grades that differ. One calculus class might go through 50% of the material in a given year. Another class might get through 90% of the material in that same year. In that case, getting an A in the first class is going to be a breeze compared to getting an A in the second class. In fact, a kid who got a B in a tough class with no curve might actually know the material better than a kid who got an A in an easy class with a teacher who curves every test.
My point here is that grades and expectations from school to school may differ widely, but SAT tests do not. With the SAT, everyone is getting more or less the same test at the same exact time.
So I think what the chart above is showing is that, if you really test students from different schools with one consistent standard (the SAT), you’ll find out that a lot of the kids with top grades at Podunk High can’t get top test scores because they haven’t actually learned that much. (A top 10% test score on the SAT would be 1350 or above)…
Whatever the cause, the fact remains that some kids have mastered the material on a statewide, and indeed nationwide, scale and some have only gotten an A in their high school class from the teacher everyone considers an easy A. Those two things are not at all the same. But Saul Geiser seems more than happy to sidestep all of this so long as the result is greater racial equity.
The Atlantic piece seems to confirm my own intuition about this:
Grade inflation has, after all, eroded the signaling value of a strong high-school transcript: More than 25 percent of those taking UC San Diego’s remedial math course in 2024 had a 4.0 GPA in high-school math.
The UC system knows the SAT is useful. It put out a 227-page report back in early 2020 which concluded the SAT could help predict how qualified applicants were better than grades alone.
In January 2019, the system asked a faculty task force to study whether required exams such as the SAT and the ACT could be safely eliminated. In an exhaustive 227-page report a year later, the authors found that scores were “substantially” useful in predicting student outcomes, such as college GPA and graduation rates, better than relying on high-school GPA alone. This was true of disadvantaged students as well as privileged ones. The task force recommended that the university system keep its testing requirements; in April 2020, the UC academic senate unanimously concurred.
One month later, the school reversed course. It turns out that a 227-page report showing SAT’s are useful is no match for the desire for more equity.
One month later, though, at the recommendation of Janet Napolitano, the former Arizona governor and Obama-administration official who was president of the UC system at the time, the Board of Regents voted unanimously to end the testing requirements. The minutes of that meeting recorded that Napolitano was “unpersuaded that the added value of the SAT/ACT outweighed all of UC’s mitigation measures employed to counteract the effect of the tests on certain populations, especially in light of the correlation between the tests and socioeconomic level and ethnicity.”
To bring this back to where we started, the result is a bunch of incoming students who were accepted based on their 4.0 GPA’s but who can’t do middle school math.
UCSD’s “Math 2” course teaches grade-school math (grades 1–8) to freshmen. From page 49 of the university’s own report:
• 25% of students got 7 + 2 = ___ + 6 wrong
• 61% of students, a large majority, couldn’t round 374,518 to the nearest hundred
• 37% of students couldn’t… https://t.co/GGDvrF5AIy pic.twitter.com/2WepqqnmWp— Chris Brunet (@chrisbrunet) November 11, 2025
I’ve said before that none of this matters for the majority of colleges in the U.S. which are simply not that competitive to begin with. If you are accepting 70% of applicants (which more than half of schools do), you probably don’t need to look at SAT scores. But it does matter at schools like UC Berkeley, UCLA and UC San Diego, which are top STEM schools nationally.
The goal at these top schools should not be racial equity, but recognition of achievement and proven academic merit. Those goals are better served by looking at SAT results as well as grades and other factors. All of the people in deep blue California sporting “in this house we believe in science” lawn signs really ought to be on the side of testing and merit.
Editor’s Note: President Trump is fighting to ensure America’s kids get the education they deserve.
Help us fight back against Big Government waste and restore power to the states. Join HotAir VIP and use promo code FIGHT to receive 60% off your membership.
Read the full article here
