Zvezdelina Stankova has taught mathematics at UC Berkeley for nearly three decades, but in 2023 - when she returned to teaching introductory calculus for the first time since the pandemic began - she noticed something alarming. The bottom 25 percent of students weren't just struggling; they were, as she put it, “in freefall.” Teaching had become an exercise in triage: “With one hand, I am teaching a complex integral, and with the other hand, I am telling them how to solve a simple linear equation like 7x - 2 = 5.”
Mina Aganagic, a string theorist at Berkeley with 20 years of calculus teaching under her belt, observed the same phenomenon. She found herself reviewing “basic algebra stuff, like fractions,” and noted that students' confusion extended even to “the meaning of equals in an equation.” Both professors reported that students came to office hours trying valiantly to pass - often by memorizing equations they couldn't understand - but most who arrived without knowing algebra simply failed.
Stankova and Aganagic believe they've identified the culprit, and it's not just pandemic disruption. The entire University of California system abandoned standardized tests in admissions during COVID-19 and, unlike many peer institutions, has neither restored them nor announced plans to do so. Late last month, the two professors - along with three other Berkeley colleagues - published an open letter arguing for reinstatement of testing requirements, at least for students pursuing STEM degrees. “Basic mathematical fluency is analogous to literacy; without it, success in university-level STEM becomes structurally unattainable for students,” they wrote. Their letter arrived just six months after a UC San Diego report found that one in 12 of its incoming students struggled with middle-school math. Since publication, more than 1,400 professors and lecturers have co-signed.
The rupture was years in the making: a policy change meant to promote equity collided with the practical reality of teaching calculus to students who can't handle basic algebra - even at some of America's premier scientific universities. The UC-faculty rebellion may succeed: David Volz, a UC Riverside professor who chairs the faculty committee on undergraduate admissions, told The Atlantic that the system is establishing a working group to study reinstating standardized-exam requirements. (Another working group will examine high-school course requirements for admissions.) Any recommendations, however, will likely take at least a year.
The endless debates about standardized tests have long been kabuki theater. They're not really about whether trigonometry knowledge is latent classism, but about the trade-offs selective universities face in balancing academic excellence with serving underprivileged applicants. Supporters see tests like the SAT as objective measures of academic preparation, allowing comparison across varied schooling. Tests can identify excellent students at mediocre high schools - and mediocre students at excellent ones.
Critics, however, cast standardized tests as oppressive tools that reinforce inequality. Because scores correlate with privilege, the argument goes, they must simply be measures of privilege itself. Yet the same objection applies to high-school transcripts, essays, and extracurricular activities - all of which also favor students from wealthy, well-educated families. The tests are also entangled in the affirmative action debate: they provide a quantitative measure of how large racial preferences actually are.
UC was agonizing over standardized tests long before the pandemic. In January 2019, the system asked a faculty task force to study whether exams like the SAT and ACT could be safely eliminated. A 227-page report a year later found that scores were “substantially” useful in predicting student outcomes - college GPA and graduation rates - better than high-school GPA alone, and this held true for disadvantaged students as well. The task force recommended keeping testing requirements; in April 2020, the UC academic senate unanimously concurred.
One month later, at the recommendation of Janet Napolitano - former Arizona governor and Obama official who was then UC system president - the Board of Regents voted unanimously to end the requirements. Napolitano was “unpersuaded that the added value of the SAT/ACT outweighed all of UC's mitigation measures employed to counteract the effect of the tests on certain populations,” according to meeting minutes. A later legal settlement with plaintiffs who deemed the SAT discriminatory committed the system to being test-blind until 2025.
Even as UC bucked its faculty, it moved in line with the rest of academia - at first. The pandemic disruption coincided with cresting progressive concerns about equity, leading many elite universities to go test-optional or test-blind. Yet most top universities have since reversed course, leaving UC an outlier. MIT reinstated testing in 2022, arguing that student success was “significantly improved by considering standardized testing - especially in mathematics.” Harvard followed in 2024, Stanford in 2025, and Yale just last month.
The broader political climate has also shifted. DEI initiatives have receded after backlash. Republicans in Washington are eager to investigate higher education: in January, spurred by the UC San Diego report, Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA), chair of the Senate education committee, began an inquiry into low math preparation at 35 selective universities. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court declared race-based affirmative action unconstitutional in 2023. In California, race-based affirmative action has been banned since 1996, but universities have tried alternative processes to maintain demographic balance. Now that racial preferences are illegal nationwide, quantitative measures in applicant files may present a risk to these mitigating procedures.
These raging political debates help explain why the few hundred students arriving at UC San Diego or UC Berkeley each year needing remedial math attract outsize attention. Skeptics like Pamela Burdman of Just Equations point out that pandemic learning loss caused declines in student performance. Indeed, the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress scores showed 45 percent of 12th graders were “below basic” - the worst since 2005. In California, the share of high schoolers taking precalculus dropped from 46 percent in 2017 to 33 percent in 2024; nearly 30 percent of high-school seniors take no math at all. The gap between highest and lowest performers has widened.
Critics argue that if the pandemic caused students' problems, the SAT isn't the solution. Jonathan Glater, a Berkeley law professor who has argued against standardized tests, called the proposal “a misdiagnosis.” Yet Berkeley and other selective universities should be less exposed to such trends, since they draw from the top of the academic distribution - where performance has remained strong. And if Berkeley isn't, perhaps reinstating the test would help it do so. Grade inflation has eroded the signaling value of high-school transcripts: more than 25 percent of those taking UC San Diego's remedial math course in 2024 had a 4.0 GPA in high-school math. Essays, meanwhile, can be enhanced by AI. Without proctored standardized tests, admissions risks becoming “a random draw out of a black box,” Aganagic said.
Selective universities must inherently sort. Math tests are very useful for sorting by mathematical ability. Yet people on all sides might be surprised to learn that abandoning standardized tests didn't radically transform UC - either for better or worse. A 2025 internal report found that removing tests hardly changed the racial mix of students. At the same time, overall graduation rates didn't budge. But the faculty revolt suggests that the cost of test-blind admissions may be paid in more tangible ways: in classrooms where professors can no longer assume their students know what an equals sign means.