UC Faculty Board Pulls Back Timeline to Reconsider SAT/ACT Requirements

The University of California's Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools, known as BOARS, voted Friday to rescind the timeline it had announced just weeks earlier for studying whether to bring back SAT and ACT requirements, according to the Los Angeles Times. The webpages explaining the plan disappeared from UC's site around the same time.

No replacement plan exists yet. That's according to two board members who attended the meeting and multiple UC professors on both sides of the testing debate, as reported by the LA Times.

UC Academic Senate Chair Ahmet Palazoglu, a UC Davis chemical engineering professor, said in a statement Monday that the senate is "revising its timeline" and remains committed to a review that is "thorough, evidence-based and informed by faculty expertise." He gave no new date. UC's Office of the President did not answer the Daily Bruin's questions about what the revised timeline looks like.

The original plan, announced in June, called for two faculty work groups over the 2026-27 academic year: one on standardized testing, one on high school course requirements. If UC ultimately reinstated testing, the earliest it could take effect would be the fall 2028 application cycle, according to the LA Times.

Why This Started

UC dropped its testing requirement in 2020, initially citing COVID-19 disruptions, then went fully test-free after a unanimous Board of Regents vote. The stated rationale, per the LA Times, was concern that test scores correlated too closely with race and family wealth and screened out students of color who lacked test-prep resources.

That move made UC an outlier. Nearly every other elite university system, including all eight Ivy League schools, Stanford and Caltech, has since reinstated testing requirements that were only meant to be temporary, according to the LA Times.

The pressure to revisit the policy didn't come from politicians or outside critics this time. It came from UC's own faculty. A June 5 open letter from STEM faculty, cited by Higher Ed Dive, argued that "current admissions practices do not provide a sufficiently reliable check on mathematical readiness for STEM majors" and that instructors have had to "reteach middle-school mathematics while simultaneously teaching the material students need for sciences, engineering, economics, and other quantitatively demanding fields." As of July 2, nearly 2,400 faculty had signed that letter, including seven of the system's nine mathematics department chairs, according to Higher Ed Dive and the Daily Bruin. A separate letter from more than 900 non-STEM faculty backed the push, asking UC to also weigh the verbal reasoning portion of the tests.

The faculty letters cited a UC San Diego report finding a growing share of incoming students arriving with math skills below what their coursework requires, according to the Daily Bruin.

The Case for Test-Free Admissions

Supporters of dropping standardized tests have a genuine argument, not just a talking point: test scores have historically correlated with family income and access to prep courses, and critics say that risks admitting students based on resources rather than raw ability. UC's 2020 decision followed years of internal study and was adopted unanimously by the Board of Regents, not imposed unilaterally. Reasonable people can conclude that other measures, like grades and course rigor, better capture readiness without that socioeconomic skew.

But that argument now runs into a competing set of facts from the people actually teaching UC students. Nearly 2,400 faculty, including most of the system's math department heads, say the test-free era has coincided with a widening readiness gap in their classrooms. This is the system's own instructors describing what they see firsthand.

What's Unclear

UC has not explained why the review was pulled just before the Regents met. Higher Ed Dive noted the topic wasn't formally on the board's agenda for its July 14-15 meeting, even though faculty and students submitted comments on both sides.

UC Board Chair Maria Anguiano told the Regents at that meeting that the review "would be a major focus" of the board and academic senate over the coming year, saying the goal was "not to rehash old questions or data but an opportunity to take a fresh look at how we define and evaluate college readiness in a rapidly changing world," according to Higher Ed Dive.

ZeroHedge's Jonathan Turley frames the suspension as evidence of a deliberate slow-walk, noting UC previously commissioned a 2019 task force under then-President Janet Napolitano that studied testing and was overridden anyway. That history is real. But none of the reporting from the LA Times, Higher Ed Dive or the Daily Bruin has produced an on-record UC official admitting the delay was intended to bury the review. UC's own statements describe it as a timeline revision.