Requiring the SAT will not solve UC’s admissions problems

By Robert Kaplan, especially for CalMatters

This comment was originally posted by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

Guest Comment written by

This week, the University of California Regents will once again face one of the most contentious questions in higher education: Should the SAT be required for admission to undergraduate programs?

The The New York Times Editorial Board says yes I don’t agree.

The debate is framed as a choice between justice and academic excellence. Proponents argue that standardized tests predict college success and provide an objective measure of academic ability. Opponents argue that the test scores disadvantage students from historically underrepresented and lower-income backgrounds.

Both sides make valid points. But they are arguing about the wrong problem.

Universities keep returning to the SAT because almost every other component of the admissions process has become less informative. Admissions committees face an increasingly difficult task.

Fifty years ago, getting a perfect GPA often meant graduating first in your class. today grade inflation and weighted ranking have made near-perfect GPAs common among applicants to elite universities.

Letters of recommendation rarely mention weaknesses, forcing admissions officers to look for subtle clues that distinguish one great-looking applicant from another.

Student essays have also lost much of their value. Artificial intelligence can produce polished prose in seconds, while teachers, counselors and private consultants often help candidates revise essays multiple times before submission.

The result is a candidate pool in which almost everyone seems extraordinary.

Once students reach college, grade inflation becomes even more pronounced. During the 2024–25 school year 84% of the grades issued at Harvard were “A” or “A-,” compared to 24% in 2005

Similar trends are reported for most elite campuses, including UC Berkeley. When almost everyone gets top marks, those marks lose much of their meaning.

Ironically, standardized tests remain among the few measures that consistently differentiate applicants, giving the SAT more influence than its predictive value would justify.

Supporters claim that the SAT is unbiased because it predicts college performance similarly across racial and ethnic groups. But that misses a bigger problem.

Average SAT scores differ significantly between racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic groups, reflecting unequal educational opportunitiesfamily income, parental education and other benefits. As a result, increasing the weight of standardized tests inevitably changes who is admitted.

Public universities should be particularly concerned, especially at a time when political pressure and Decisions of the Supreme Court have limited efforts to promote diversity, equity and inclusion.

Californians at every income level support the UC system through their taxes. An admissions system that increasingly favors students with the greatest educational advantages risks weakening the role of higher education as a pathway to opportunity and economic mobility.

Education costs go beyond access. A diverse student body enriches learning by exposing future leaders to classmates of diverse backgrounds, cultures, languages, and life experiences. These interactions enrich learning, foster critical thinking, and help graduates develop the skills needed to effectively lead in an increasingly diverse society.

The answer is neither to accept nor to reject the SAT.

Instead, universities need to restore trust in the rest of the admissions process to dealing with grade inflationencouraging more candid letters of recommendation, developing better ways to assess writing in the age of AI, and finding stronger measures of creativity, persistence, and intellectual curiosity.

California also needs to strengthen the education pipeline. A recent report from UC San Diego found this many students arrive unprepared for college-level math.

Increasing the importance of the SAT will not solve this problem. The permanent solution is to improve and better alignment of high school mathematics instruction so students are prepared before applying to college.

The Regents’ decision is much more than whether to reinstate the SAT. The real challenge is restoring an admissions system in which no test is given more weight than it deserves.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.