Seven years ago, the University of California system appointed an 18-member committee to study the use of standardized tests in its undergraduate admissions. The committee included professors from all 10 campuses and a range of disciplines. They spent a year studying the issue and published a 225-page report full of evidence and recommendations.
The committee concluded that scores on the SAT and ACT, the main standardized tests for college admissions, did a better job measuring student readiness for college than high school grades. High test scores were particularly good at finding talented students from low-income families and underrepresented minority groups. For these reasons, the committee recommended the system continue to require applicants to submit SAT or ACT scores.
The university’s leaders disregarded the report.
A few months after its release, early in the Covid-19 pandemic, the system’s Board of Regents voted to stop using the tests in undergraduate admissions. Initially, the university planned to make the submission of SAT and ACT scores optional, as many other colleges did during the pandemic. Almost immediately, though, the University of California began refusing to accept SAT or ACT scores, even from students who wanted to submit them. The policy was known as “test blind.” University leaders wrongly claimed that it would make admissions fairer and more equitable.
The results have been terrible. At the University of California, San Diego, a faculty group last year reported “a steep decline in the academic preparation” among entering students. Last fall, for example, nearly 12 percent of first-year U.C.S.D. undergraduates were not qualified to take pre-calculus, a low-level class, up from only 0.5 percent in 2020. “The key problem is that many of the students coming in do not know algebra,” said Mina Aganagic, a Berkeley physics professor. More than half of entering Berkeley students who took a math placement test incorrectly answered basic questions (such as solving for x in x²> 4).
Reading and writing skills have also deteriorated, and professors say they must spend time teaching elementary skills. “After the SAT was dropped, I got students who could not write a sentence,” said Janet Sorensen, an English professor at Berkeley.
There have obviously been several recent worrisome education trends, including smartphone distraction, artificial intelligence cheating and Covid school closures. Yet the declines in preparedness among University of California students are larger than the regression elsewhere, which underscores the role of the test-blind policy. California’s top public universities have essentially randomized aspects of the admissions process, admitting unprepared students while rejecting many who could thrive there. The change has damaged the university’s mission of fostering social mobility and training the next generation of scholars. Some of the world’s greatest research institutions must increasingly focus on remediation.
Hundreds of faculty members describe the situation as an emergency. More than 1,500 science and mathematics professors, including the chairs of more than 60 departments, have signed a letter asking the university to reinstate the test requirement. More than 700 humanities and social sciences professors have signed a similar letter. They noted that A.I. has made student essays a less useful part of a college application. “As faculty, we are best positioned to see the consequences of six years of test-blind admissions,” the professors wrote.
So far, the university’s leaders are ignoring the faculty’s plea for urgency. They instead plan to appoint a new committee to study the issue over the next year, saying they need more time to understand the data. This delay could lock in the current policy until 2029 because students tend to take the SAT and ACT during junior year of high school.
The university’s trustees, known as the regents, have the final word. When they next meet, on July 14, they should have the courage to admit they made a mistake six years ago and reverse it.
Even Janet Napolitano, who was the university president in 2020 and recommended a test-blind policy then, now favors its reversal. “It was a worthwhile experiment,” she told us, “but as the results come in, it is increasingly clear that the experiment needs to be revisited.”
California’s policy change was part of a national anti-testing push that has combined a vital concern with a fundamental misunderstanding. The concern is about the deep inequities in American education that particularly affect low-income, Black, Latino and Native students. Each of these groups scores below average on the SAT and ACT.
The misunderstanding is about the reason for these gaps. The critics claim that the two tests are biased and therefore a cause of inequities. The evidence indicates otherwise. Raj Chetty, a Harvard University economist, points out that other tests show similarly large economic and racial gaps. One example is the NAEP, a test of elementary and middle-school students for which almost nobody studies. This pattern suggests that SAT tutoring, which critics often blame for score gaps, plays only a limited role, perhaps because free tutoring is available from Khan Academy and elsewhere.
The SAT and ACT obviously have their limitations. They measure reading, math and related skills, not creativity, grit or leadership. Yet they do appear to measure preparedness for highly selective colleges better than almost any other indicator, research shows. (Advanced Placement exams are also helpful.)
Some other parts of applications, like student essays, extracurricular activities and teacher recommendations, are in fact biased toward affluent students. And high school grades have become less reliable because of rapid grade inflation. In 1970, only 7 percent of college freshmen nationwide had a high-school grade average of A or higher; today, the share is roughly 40 percent.
The gaps in test scores accurately describe unacceptable inequities in American society. This editorial board has frequently argued for ambitious policies to address these problems, including a more progressive tax code, better K-12 schools, expanded preschool and measures to reverse racial discrimination. But to throw out the SAT and ACT because they show demographic gaps is akin to canceling the government’s publication of the unemployment rate because it shows similar gaps. Trying to deny a problem rarely helps solve it. The University of California is now rejecting students who would excel there, including low-income and minority students, and accepting growing numbers of students who flail.
Tellingly, when the university system announced in 2020 that it was going test-blind, it also vowed to develop an alternative test that would be “fair,” “useful” and “reliable.” The system has since abandoned the effort as “not feasible.” The reversal is a sign of the obvious: Any fair, reliable test would have results resembling those of the SAT and ACT.
Elsewhere, many other selective colleges remain test-optional, while a growing number have restored a test mandate. As Christina Paxson, the president of Brown, has written, “Standardized test scores are a much better predictor of academic success than high school grades.” The list of schools that require applicants to submit scores includes top public colleges like the University of Texas, Austin, Georgia Tech and Purdue and private colleges like Brown, Dartmouth, Georgetown, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Princeton, Stanford, Yale, the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Naval Academy and West Point both require test scores, too.
These colleges use the tests as one factor among many and, appropriately, do not tend to expect students from less advantaged backgrounds to score as highly as others. Administrators say the test scores are especially useful at identifying strong students from low-income communities. When a such a student receives even a pretty good score, it can be a sign of high potential. The University of California has chosen to be willfully blind to that potential.
Perhaps the most dispiriting part of the story is its betrayal of California’s glorious history. In 1960, the state released a “master plan for higher education” based on a three-tier structure to serve its population: community colleges, the California State University system and the University of California system. The first two tiers have helped propel millions of people into the middle class and beyond. The University of California sits at the top of the pyramid, educating some of the world’s best students, winning Nobel Prizes and contributing to advances in medicine, computing and much more.
Crucially, students often move from one tier to another. Each year, close to 20,000 students who started at a community college transfer to a University of California campus, and they are one reason that Berkeley and U.C.L.A. have long been among the most diverse elite colleges in America. Many transfer students initially lacked the qualifications to attend these campuses but caught up at community college and demonstrated they were ready to benefit from a more challenging curriculum. Under the test-blind policy, more students are immediately thrown into classes for which they are unprepared.
When the university’s regents adopted the test-blind policy in 2020, some understood that they were choosing not to follow the science. On social media recently, Jelani Nelson, a former chair of electrical engineering and computer sciences at Berkeley, published video clips from the decisive 2020 meeting, at which several regents said they were uncomfortable rejecting the evidence. “I am a believer in data and science,” one said. Another said: “Facts matter. And data does matter.” Ultimately, though, they deferred to their colleagues who wanted to ignore test results. As Professor Nelson wrote, “They succumbed to the fad of the moment.”
When the regents meet this month, they will face a choice. They can acknowledge their error and restore the test requirement, or they can adopt a classic bureaucratic dodge and appoint yet another committee to study a problem that has an evident answer.
