UC Admissions Board Scraps SAT Review Plan One Day Before Regents Meet
The University of California’s admissions board voted Friday to withdraw its month-long plan to study whether the SAT and ACT should return to UC admissions, leaving the system’s biggest admissions battle without a roadmap just days before The Board of Regents meets in San Francisco.
The story: UC Regents voted unanimously in May 2020 to phase out the SAT and ACT, and the system has been completely test-blind ever since. The current saga began with a UC San Diego Task Force Report showing that freshman placement test scores are collapsing (about a 30-fold jump since 2020 among students testing lower than high school math) while UC Berkeley math professors marked years of failing diagnostic scores among first-semester students.
That prompted an open letter from May more than 600 UC STEM faculty are requesting SAT retakes for STEM candidates, and The Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences joined in Juneciting similar declines in reading and writing readiness. Faculty organizers now want the regents to put the restoration on the September agenda for the fall 2027 application cycle.
Why is it important?
UC is the largest and most widely viewed retention of test-free admissions. Every Ivy League school, Stanford, Caltech and MIT are already asking for test results againand thousands of UC professors have signed open letters saying admitted students can’t handle college-level work. Withdrawal of the review plan—without replacement—pushes any testing decision further while another class of applicants applies test-blind.
What happened this week
The Board of Admissions and School Relations (BOARS), a faculty committee of UC’s Academic Senate, announced in June that two task forces will study standardized testing and UC’s 15-course high school requirements, with recommendations that could bring the tests back as early as the fall 2028 application cycle.
On Friday, the board rescinded that plan, and pages describing it disappeared from UC’s website. There is no timeline yet for a replacement.
After reports of Monday’s vote emerged, Academic Senate President Ahmet Palazoglu released the following statement:The Academic Senate is not reversing its commitment to a comprehensive review of standardized testing in admissions. Recognizing the importance of this issue, the Academic Senate is revising its timeline while ensuring that the upcoming review is thorough, evidence-based, and informed by faculty expertise.“
Palazoglou is expected to address the issue at Tuesday’s regents meeting. Regents are still scheduled to discuss high school course requirements on Wednesday, and UC is separate measuring test scores for Smarter Balanced in California as a reception data point.
How does this connect
As we reported in December, UC San Diego’s own task force was found more than 900 freshmen were placed on remedial math covering material from grades 1-8, and more than a quarter of them had a 4.0 GPA. It happened in the same cycle UCSD attracted a record 160,150 applications, while the system admitted a record number of California students for the fall of 2025.
Admissions and track records are moving in the same direction, and without test scores, UC has less data than ever to tell which receivers are ready.
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