There was a bad change in Mina Aganagic’s calculus classes. A math teacher at UC Berkeley noticed that some of his students couldn’t do basic multiplication, which is something most kids learn by the fourth grade. These weren’t students who were having trouble with difficult theorems. They were having trouble with math. That kind of information isn’t included in statistics on admissions. It shows up in a lecture hall with several hundred students when a teacher realizes she can’t teach calculus to people who don’t understand what they’ve already learned.
As part of the open letter that thousands of UC faculty members signed this spring, Aganagic asked the University of California system to use standardized tests again in the admissions process. The university got rid of the SAT and ACT requirements in 2020, first as a temporary fix for the pandemic and then as a permanent change to the policy. Now, six years later, it’s harder to ignore the effects on students’ grades.
The UC Berkeley SAT vs. ACT debate has come up again, but this time it’s much more heated than usual. This time, it’s not coming from political commentators or think tanks. It’s coming from mathematicians, scientists, social scientists, and humanities researchers who work directly with the students who are getting in now. The STEM letter has been signed by more than two-thirds of UC’s math faculty. Svetlana Jitomirskaya, a math professor at Berkeley, says that level of agreement among faculty members has never been seen before.
It’s not just the faculty’s anger that makes this important to pay attention to. The data under it is what it is. Calculus results for about 2,800 first-semester students from 2021 to 2023 were looked at, and it was found that between 17% and 31% had severe academic problems. This number went up every year. By fall 2023, 46% of students in the least prepared group had failed or dropped out of calculus. The students who were the most prepared failed at 4%. This huge difference in preparation raises a simple question: how do students with such big gaps in their preparation get into one of the best public university systems in the country?
Faculty say the answer is that the university no longer has a good way to tell if students are ready for school. These days, high school grade inflation has made GPA a weak sign. Personal statements are harder to grade now that essays are written with AI help. Even though both the SAT and ACT had problems, they did offer one thing that was consistent: a standard floor that could, at the very least, show students who were likely to have trouble with college-level work. Without that, the people in charge of admissions are working with only part of the facts. Students pay for it when they get to campus and feel like they have too much to do.
People who are against standardized tests are right to be worried about what they measure. Score gaps do show how much money someone makes. Rich families can pay for test prep, tutoring, and retakes. That criticism wasn’t made up by the UC Board of Regents when they decided to get rid of the tests in May 2020; it’s a real problem with the way the school is set up. But the faculty’s counterargument, which was clearly made by Aganagic, is that getting rid of the test hasn’t fixed any of those problems. It’s only made it less clear. A first-generation college student who got into Berkeley without knowing how to do well in calculus hasn’t been helped. Less safety nets have been put in place to make the fall harder.
Joel Hass, a mathematician at UC Davis, put it simply: putting a student who isn’t ready for the program where they are likely to fail is “a cruel recipe for ruining their lives.” It’s hard to ignore that sentence. It doesn’t sound like someone who is against access. The way it sounds like someone is worried about what will happen if access is mixed up with preparation.
As I watch this debate play out, I get the impression that the university is stuck between two real values: increasing opportunities and upholding academic standards. They haven’t figured out how to hold both of them yet. Standardized tests are back at MIT, Stanford, Harvard, and Yale. UC hasn’t changed. It’s still not clear if that’s because of principle or because the process is taking too long. In June, a faculty committee agreed to start a review process. They expect to have a report by May 2027, and applicants probably won’t hear about any changes to the policy before fall 2028. That’s a long time frame for a problem that teachers say gets worse every semester.
You remember Aganagic’s warning that UC degrees might not mean much in the future. It’s not too dramatic. This is what a professor says quietly when she hasn’t any more polite ways to explain what she sees after years of seeing a pattern form.
