OPINION:
You know it’s bad when progressive California says it’s bad.
More than 1,100 University of California math and science professors are pleading with UC regents to reinstate college entry exams after many of them have had to spend the bulk of their time in the classroom reteaching accepted students middle-school mathematics.
In a two-page letter delivered to UC regents, the professors cite that nearly one-third of students taking calculus at UC Berkeley “displayed severe preparation deficits.”
It comes on the heels of a University of California, San Diego, faculty report last year that said the number of accepted students who had to take elementary and middle school math before they could pass precalculus at the university level increased from 0.5% to 8.5% between 2020 and 2025.
Learning losses were well documented during and after the COVID-19 pandemic emergency, which shuttered many schools nationwide, some for as long as two years. During that period, many universities made college entry exams optional or eliminated them altogether, arguing that they discriminated against Black, Hispanic and poor students.
Today, more than 90% of schools don’t mandate entrance exams, according to FairTest.
Yet the tide seems to be shifting in the right direction. Most Ivy League schools, citing the need to maintain academic rigor, counteract grade inflation and accurately measure student readiness, are reinstating standardized testing, such as the ACT or SAT. These include Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Princeton, Brown, and the University of Pennsylvania, alongside a growing list of other prestigious private and public universities.
Test-required admission standards have always been the most nondiscriminatory method to select prospective students. The ACT and SAT provide administrators with a baseline comparison needed to ensure future success; it does no good to admit a student into an advanced program based solely on their race or ideology.
The STEM field recognizes this most clearly, as future scientists and engineers need a foundational education on which to build, regardless of their skin color or politics.
Notably, an anonymous survey of faculty at Berkeley — where Democrats outnumber Republicans 10-to-1 — found that 83% of respondents across all departments supported a return to standardized testing.
It was progressives and teachers unions who were at the forefront of the movement to eliminate testing, arguing that the practice penalized schools and students. They advocated instead for holistic assessments and classroom-based work.
Well, the social experiment of holistic assessments and classroom-based work as a path to higher education simply has not panned out — so much so that even California professors are demanding the return of standardized testing.
“We now observe preparation gaps so severe that instructors must reteach middle-school mathematics while simultaneously teaching the material students need for sciences, engineering, economics, and other quantitatively demanding fields,” the California professors wrote. “UC has finite resources and can help only so many students.”
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