The University of California (UC’s) six-year experiment in banishing standardized testing requirements has, predictably, not gone according to plan.
Back in 2020, the UC Board of Regents voted to phase out SAT and ACT test scores in admissions requirements, echoing now-familiar claims that the tests were unfairly biased against black, Latino, and poor students. Now, as faculty deal with students who are severely deficient in math, the university system is revisiting its ill-advised decision.
According to an open letter signed by 1,400 UC faculty members, “We now observe preparation gaps so severe that instructors must re-teach middle school mathematics while simultaneously teaching the material students need for sciences, engineering, economics and other quantitatively demanding fields.” Unsurprisingly, removing the SAT and ACT requirement has simply functioned as another form of affirmative action, pushing through underqualified students with no objective method of assessing their academic ability.
The potential move back to standardized testing is part of California’s continuing retreat from peak 2020 racial leftism on select issues. The San Francisco school board recently reinstated the option for eighth-grade students to take Algebra, which had been banned for 12 years over similar “racial equity” concerns. During the time period of the ban, racial gaps in math scores did not improve.
Of course, like most people caught up in the fevered 2020 political zeitgeist, proponents of removing ACT and SAT testing requirements likely didn’t think that far ahead. The fact that a racial standardized testing gap exists, in the leftist worldview, automatically means that the test must be racially biased. The idea that black and Latino students have any kind of agency, or that different students simply have varying levels of intelligence, is anathema to leftist ideology.
The UC system’s review of its policies comes as other universities have already made similar reversals, including Columbia University, the final Ivy League school to bring back standardized testing requirements. Hopefully California will follow suit, and continue to move on from the worst of 2020-era leftist fanaticism.
