The University of California's admissions board voted Friday to withdraw its month-old plan to study whether the SAT and ACT should return to UC admissions, leaving the system's biggest admissions fight without a road map just days before the Board of Regents meets in San Francisco.
The Backstory: UC regents voted unanimously in May 2020 to phase out the SAT and ACT, and the system has been fully test-blind since. The current saga started with a UC San Diego workgroup report showing freshmen placement test scores collapsing (a roughly 30-fold jump since 2020 in students testing below high-school math) while UC Berkeley math professors flagged years of failing diagnostic results among first-semester calculus students.
That fueled a May open letter from more than 600 UC STEM faculty demanding the SAT's return for STEM applicants, and humanities and social science faculty joined in June, citing similar declines in reading and writing readiness. Faculty organizers now want the regents to put restoration on the September agenda for the fall 2027 application cycle.
Why It Matters
UC is the largest and most-watched holdout on test-free admissions. Every Ivy League school, Stanford, Caltech, and MIT already require test scores again, and thousands of UC's own professors have signed open letters saying admitted students can't handle college-level work. Pulling the review plan — without a replacement — pushes any testing decision further out while another class of applicants applies test-blind.
What Happened This Week
The Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools (BOARS), a faculty committee of the UC Academic Senate, announced in June that two work groups would study standardized testing and UC's 15-course high school requirements, with recommendations that could have brought tests back as early as the fall 2028 application cycle.
On Friday, the board rescinded that plan, and the pages describing it disappeared from UC's website. No replacement timeline exists yet.
After reports of the vote surfaced Monday, Academic Senate Chair Ahmet Palazoglu issued the following statement: "The Academic Senate is not rescinding its commitment to a comprehensive review of standardized testing in admissions. Recognizing the significance of this issue, the Academic Senate is revising its timeline while ensuring the forthcoming review is thorough, evidence-based and informed by faculty expertise."
Palazoglu is expected to address the issue at Tuesday's regents meeting. The regents are still scheduled to discuss high school course requirements Wednesday, and UC is separately weighing California's Smarter Balanced test scores as an admissions data point.
How This Connects
As we reported in December, UC San Diego's own workgroup found more than 900 freshmen placed into remedial math covering grades 1-8 material, and over a quarter of them had 4.0 high school GPAs. That happened in the same cycle UCSD drew a record 160,150 applications, and while the system admitted a record number of California students for fall 2025.
Record admissions and record remediation are moving in the same direction, and without test scores, UC has less data than ever to tell which admits are prepared.
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Editor: Colin Graves
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