The admissions board at the University of California voted to withdraw – for the time being – its study plan to reintroduce the SAT or ACT requirements for admission, a move that leaves one of the most watched debates at the university 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 will convene two task forces until next year: one to measure the role of standardized tests in admissions, the other to reexamine high school academic requirements for admission to UC.
At Friday's meeting, the board voted to back off the plan, and the links that described it — which appeared on UC's website late last week — have been removed. There is no plan for a replacement yet, according to two board members who attended the meeting, as well as several UC professors who are aware of the decision and who have championed or opposed the testing requirements.
The decisions are slated for, possibly months, a process UC said will be a thorough, evidence-driven review that UC President James B. Milliken hailed as “thorough.”
It is not clear why the program was suspended.
In a statement Monday evening, UC Academic Senate Chair Ahmet Palazoglu said the senate is “not backing down on its commitment to a comprehensive review of standardized admissions testing.” The Board of Trustees is a committee of the Senate.
“Recognizing the importance of this issue, the Academic Senate is updating its timeline while ensuring that future reviews are comprehensive, evidence-based and informed by faculty expertise,” said Palazoglu, who is also a professor of chemical engineering at UC Davis.
Palazzoglu did not announce a new timeline or plan. He is expected to elaborate on this issue when he delivers his speech at the regents meeting on Tuesday.
The program has faced criticism from many quarters — and has put UC in the national spotlight for its use of standardized testing in college admissions.
UC made it optional in 2020 and later did not test after one regent vote based in part on concerns that the test tested students of color who often lack test preparation resources and that scores are more correlated with race and family wealth than readiness.
UC – the most prominent public university system – stands alone among elite institutions in maintaining test-free admissions. Many competing private universities, including all of the Ivy League schools, Stanford and Caltech, have reinstated standardized testing requirements due to the disruptions of the COVID-19 era or concerns about racial equity.
Faculty complaints that first-year STEM students were severely lacking in math skills surfaced more than months before the admissions board in June said it would study to reinstate UC's testing policy. If testing were required again, the policy would take effect before the fall 2028 application cycle, the plan said. Some lecturers argue that the university is moving too slowly.
Others, including those opposed to the reinstatement of the test requirements, say UC officials will have little data to look at how test scores are used in relation to the preparation levels of enrolled students, and say the correlation of standardized tests with wealth and race could shut students out of opportunities at UC.
Anxiety during withdrawal
Time does not stabilize a particular skill. Michael Stryker, a UCSF physiology professor and BOARS member, said the interval between the board's retreat Friday and the July 14-15 executive meeting was so short that it could cause confusion.
“I can see the administration is surprised that what they're reading in the press about the testing debate is no longer true,” Stryker said. The Professor refused to divulge details of the committee's deliberations that led it to withdraw its plans. The admissions board posts public minutes on its website, but those take at least weeks to upload after the meeting.
UC had carefully laid out a road map: One task force would investigate the “pros and cons” of relying on SAT and ACT scores and California's Smart Balanced assessment for 11th grade.
The second group was to examine whether the 15 high school courses required to enter a UC campus are “potentially decisive/rigorous” 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 curriculum requirements Wednesday at a public meeting.
Any changes would require the approval of the regents. A decision on any of these issues was not planned for this week's meetings.
The next steps are uncertain
Since the program has been canceled, it is unclear what UC will do next.
Stryker, who said the board is not scheduled to meet again until the fall, stressed that it still has jurisdiction over admissions issues and could revisit testing concerns at a later date.
“I don't think they will face the problems that have made the road map later this year,” said Stryker, who is leaving office and said there will be an increase in money for the new school year. “But BOARS can act very quickly if they choose to.”
Zvezdelina Stankova, a UC Berkeley math professor who is among those who collected more than 3,000 signatures in STEM and humanities open letters supporting the test published last month was not specific about the abandoned roadmap. The two task forces, he said, were “a way to delay a decision,” and the specific recommendation — SAT or no SAT — should have been shared with UC's Academic Senate before working its way up to the regents. “Better late than never,” he said.
Stankova said she and her colleagues wrote to the regents in recent days asking the board “to make a public commitment at this meeting to put the reinstatement of the SAT/ACT on the September 2026 agenda as an action item,” working through the fall 2027 application cycle.
Stryker said the abandoned study was structurally incapable of producing useful evidence.
Because UC largely stopped collecting test scores after 2020, he wrote in a letter to other board members shared with The Times, there is no comparable group of applicants to confirm today's tests.
“In the absence of sound data,” Stryker wrote, the inspection crew “will have little to do but debate the politics of inspection.” He said the board should recommend bringing back the 2027 standardized test and studying its results in four years, using the same methods used by UC when it last tested in 2020.
That year, the faculty committee produced hundreds of pages of analysis that ultimately recommended UC continue to use the SAT and ACT in admissions. The committee agreed with critics of the SAT that the test is linked to race and wealth, but noted that similar patterns are seen in grade point averages and other academic measures, and that comprehensive and comprehensive admissions tests used by UC campuses account for such disparities.
The regents, with the support of then-UC President Janet Napolitano, voted unanimously in May 2020 to end the testing requirements and said UC should study the feasibility of creating its own standardized test. A separate faculty committee later said it was impossible for UC to conduct its own test in the short time required.
