I'm sure the Regents thought that they had put the SAT issue behind them, at least temporarily. The current Academic Senate leadership may have the same thoughts. But the Regents and the incoming Senate reps are likely to hear more about it, at least in public comments, at the upcoming mid-September meetings:
From the San Francisco Standard (8-15-2026), by Zvezdelina Stankova:* ...I teach mathematics at UC Berkeley. Three days a week, I stand in front of lecture halls with 500 to 1,400 students. By the second week of the semester, I already know who is in trouble. Some students are five to eight years behind in mathematics. Office hours that should be spent discussing integrals instead become lessons on fractions and basic algebra you would expect students to learn in middle school. That is why this spring and summer, thousands of faculty members across all 10 UC campuses — including more than two-thirds of UC’s mathematics faculty — signed open letters urging the system to restore the SAT and ACT in admissions.
Five Nobel laureates joined us, along with professors from across the university, including Beatriz Manz, Berkeley’s first Latina full professor. We did so because what an admission letter is supposed to mean — that a student is ready to attend the school — no longer matches what we see in our classrooms. We did so because what an admission letter is supposed to mean — that a student is ready to attend the school — no longer matches what we see in our classrooms.
In January 2020, a UC task force studied standardized testing and recommended keeping it. Then-President Janet Napolitano nevertheless urged the Board of Regents to phase out the SAT and ACT, citing pandemic disruptions and long-standing equity concerns. The regents voted that May to make testing optional, and a court ruling later that year, focused on access for students with disabilities, required UC to become completely test-blind through 2025. Since then, admissions officers have been forbidden from considering the one standardized measure that provided a common academic benchmark across California’s thousands of high schools.
Many peer universities have since reconsidered. MIT, Stanford, Harvard, and Yale all suspended testing requirements during the pandemic. All have reinstated them. Across the Ivy League, similar reversals are underway. UC has moved in the opposite direction. Faculty asked the university to revisit the policy quickly, but the timeline has repeatedly slipped. The Academic Senate now plans a review that will conclude in June 2027, meaning no new admissions policy could take effect before fall 2028. Students don’t have that kind of time: They attend college once! ...
Jennifer Doudna, the Nobel Prize-winning Berkeley scientist known for pioneering gene editing, summarized the concern in a letter to the regents this summer. “The test-blind policy was a well-intentioned experiment,” she wrote, “but the reality in our classrooms shows that it has failed.” Admitting students who are unprepared, she warned, “sets them up for discouraging struggle. … We cannot afford another cycle of administrative delay.” ...
Full op ed at https://sfstandard.com/opinion/2026/08/15/uc-berkeley-sat-test-blind-admissions-math-scores/.
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*Zvezdelina Stankova is a teaching professor of mathematics at UC Berkeley and recipient of the Mathematical Association of America’s Deborah and Franklin Tepper Haimo Award — the nation’s top honor for college math teaching. She is also one of the five original authors of the UC STEM faculty open letter urging the University of California to restore the SAT and ACT.
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NOTE: The Daily Cal found that the op ed was partly written by AI:
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