By Thomas Ultican 6/9/2026
STEM educators at the University of California (UC) are calling for re-implementing standardized testing for enrollment. This move would be great for the people cashing in on students and for maintaining elitism. However, it is financially harmful to families and undermines equity. Multiple research efforts show that high school transcripts and GPA (Grade Point Average) — which are not profit drivers — provide superior information to standardized testing.
In 2020, the UC system stopped requiring SAT or ACT testing data for enrollment. At the time both the LA Times and the San Diego Union posted articles opposing this move. The San Diego Union stated,
“UC admits students to campuses based on 14 criteria but bases systemwide eligibility on only two — test scores and high school grade point average. Looking at those two criteria, the task force found SAT scores to be a better predictor of UC performance than GPA because grading standards differ across schools and teachers.”
This finding of the University of California’s Task Force on Standardized Testing is surprising. Many studies have found the opposite. A 2014 study of 123,000 students sponsored by the National Association for College Admission Counseling was performed at 33 schools including Wake Forest, Bowdoin and Smith. The schools all made SAT or ACT test score submittals optional for student applicants. It is believed that those who did not reveal scores likely had significantly lower scores. However, the college GPAs and graduation rates were almost identical between the two groups. “Students with strong high school grades generally performed well in college despite poor test scores.”
A 2020 study of 55,000 Chicago public schools conducted by the University of Chicago found that GPA was a much better predicator of both freshman year grades and graduation rates compared to ACT testing. According to the lead author of the study, Elaine Allensworth: “GPAs measure a very wide variety of skills and behaviors that are needed for success in college, where students will encounter widely varying content and expectations. In contrast, standardized tests measure only a small set of the skills that students need to succeed in college, and students can prepare for these tests in narrow ways that may not translate into better preparation to succeed in college.”
Similar research performed in 2022 at the University of Tennessee and another 2022 effort at the University of Iowa showed testing not to be as predictive as GPA. A faculty report at Purdue noted that SAT scores are really weak in predicting graduation and claimed if you added the other factors, they might even turn up negative. Jon Boeckenstedt, vice provost of Oregon State University, referred to admissions testing as pseudo-academic factors that add “almost nothing to an admission officer’s ability to predict an individual student’s academic performance in college.”
Berkley’s Saul Geiser explained the error giving rise to the University of Californias Task Force’s surprising conclusion. Geiser’s abstract states:
“One of the major claims of the report of University of California’s Task Force on Standardized Testing is that SAT and ACT scores are superior to high-school grades in predicting how students will perform at UC. This finding has been widely reported in the news media and cited in several editorials favoring UC’s continued use of SAT/ACT scores in university admissions. But the claim is spurious, the statistical artifact of a classic methodological error: omitted variable bias. Compared to high-school grades, SAT/ACT scores are much more strongly correlated with student demographics like family income, parental education, and race/ethnicity. As a result, when researchers omit student demographics in their prediction models, the predictive value of the tests is artificially inflated. When student demographics are included in the model, the findings are reversed: High-school grades in college-preparatory courses are actually the stronger predictor of UC student outcome.” (Emphasis Added)
Behind the Testing Advocacy
College Board reports that in 2024, 1.97 million students took the SAT. This was a 3% increase over 2023. That means that just this one product they took in $100 million. They also sell test preparation materials and tutoring. Testing at this company is generating a large cash flow which pays many big salaries that are not counted as profits. So of course, companies like College Board like this business.
However, the reason for 600 stem educators in the UC system calling for testing to be resumed is not so obvious. Their joint letter stated, “An admissions process that ignores foundational readiness does a disservice to the most vulnerable students.” Berkeley math teacher Zvezda Stankova is noted as a lead organizer of the movement. She described a spring 2023 Calculus II class as being eye opening and stated:
“Something had changed drastically. The bottom was taken out, and there were 25 to 30% of the students who were in free fall. There was nothing you could do for them. They were just not prepared.”
If these students were in Calculus II, doesn’t that mean they passed a Calculus I class the previous fall at Berkeley? That indicates that either their Berkley teacher in the fall just passed them along or Stankova is a terrible educator. It does not indicate that their weakness was not discovered because they did not take the SAT.
The STEM faculty at University of California San Diego (UCSD) provided about 200 of the 600 signatures of UC faculty calling for the testing requirements to be reinstated for admission. The latest data provided by the UC system says that the new admits GPA at UCSD was greater than 4.11 and at Berkeley it was greater than 4.15. It is beyond my comprehension how students with this kind of success in high school are not succeeding.
Since high school grades are the gold standard predictor of success in college, the complaints of the UC educators make little sense.
Harry Feder Executive Director and Akil Bello Senior Director at Fairtest.org put together a report refuting that New York Times calling for a returned to mandatory SAT testing for college admissions. An early claim in their paper states:
“The SAT is an extraordinarily effective self-validation mechanism for an elitist ‘meritocracy’ to continue to perpetuate itself. It is designed to maintain the existing class structure.”
They conclude their report stating:
“[D]ata indicates requiring the test will turn away so many more otherwise qualified disadvantaged applicants. One can only conclude that the real motivators of the test requirement crowd are: a) keeping their alma maters “elite” (and all the coding that comes with that); b) enrollment management or c) economic self-interest.”
One of my favorite quotes about elites comes from Oregon States Jon Boeckenstedt:
“Maybe–just maybe–the term “elite” means “uncluttered by poor people.” And maybe that’s the problem?”
Conclusion
I agree with Saul Geiser, former UC admissions official, when he stated that the SAT is “a poor fit for America’s public universities.”
I don’t believe this but maybe the COVID disruption in education caused some holes in the recent math students at these universities. It seems much more likely that there is a hidden agenda and these stellar students matriculating to the UC did not actually collapse.
I earned a mechanical engineering degree from San Diego State University and did graduate school at UCSD. After working in Silicon Valley, I returned to San Diego to become a teacher. I would be completely shocked if my top scoring AP physics students did not do well at a UC but I do know from my experience that lower-level math teachers at junior colleges are superior instructors to those I observed on a UC campus. Maybe the COVID disruption did more to harm teaching at the UC than it did to harm the performance newly admitted students.
Nobody disputes that the SAT does an excellent job correlating with family wealth but as the authors at Fairtest wrote, “The tests hurt the chances of far more poor and underrepresented students of talent than they help.” When SAT and ACT data are compared to other application data, they are redundant and not predictive.
SAT and ACT testing are expensive and provide virtually no benefit to universities.
tultican 
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