A math professor at UC Berkeley has an opinion piece in today's Washington Post calling for the return of the SAT. Mina Aganagic teaches math and physics at the school. She calls what the UC system has done with testing a failed experiment.

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In spring 2020, the University of California’s Board of Regents suspended the use of SAT and ACT scores in admissions amid concerns that standardized tests were inequitable. But UC faculty had already examined and rejected that claim. In January 2020, after a year-long review, a faculty task force had recommended keeping standardized testing requirements...

UC’s faculty governing body, the Assembly of the Academic Senate, voted 51-0 to adopt the task force’s recommendation. Then-UC President Janet Napolitano decided to eliminate the testing requirement anyway, and the regents reluctantly followed. Thus began UC’s admissions experiment: a systemwide policy change launched against the unanimous opposition of UC’s faculty.

Six years later, the experiment has run its course. The faculty task force was right. Napolitano was wrong. And the outcome is even worse than the task force predicted.

She mentions in passing that goal here was greater equity. Equity has been the main push behind a series of terrible education decisions in California. It's the reason San Francisco stopped teaching Algebra in Middle School, forcing students who wanted to take advanced math to take a key class in summer school. As with the experiment dropping the SAT, dropping Algebra proved to be a mistake. It made life harder for top students interested in STEM careers but did nothing for the lagging students it was supposed to help. San Francisco eventually reversed course, but only after 12 years of bad policy.

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The SAT situation is the same thing done for the same reason with the same result.

The consequences are visible in college classrooms. UC San Diego reported that entering students with math skills below high school level increased nearly thirtyfold in five years and roughly 1 in 12 had preparation below middle school benchmarks. At UC Berkeley, 20 to 30 percent of first-semester calculus students have displayed severe preparation deficits for three consecutive years.

Students who struggle with fractions are being asked, in the same semester, to learn far more complex concepts like limits, derivatives and Riemann integrals. Mathematics is like building a tower: Each level depends on the soundness of the one below. A student who has not mastered basic algebra is missing the load-bearing structure on which calculus depends.

Placing unprepared students into the same classroom as prepared ones puts brakes on the entire class. Our UC Berkeley calculus classes now have to pause to explain basic properties of addition and multiplication — for example, that (a+b) c = ac + bc. According to California’s Common Core standards, this material is taught in third grade.

What students learn in third grad would look like this: 6 × (5+2) = (6 × 5) + (6 × 2). Starting in 8th grade they would get the version with three variables. In any case, it's pretty basic and certainly something that students admitted to Berkeley should know. 

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But, again, equity Trumps academic merit in California. So the push now is to follow this new equity of access with "equity of outcomes." This is really what equity always means. It means handing prizes, like admission to extremely competitive colleges, to people who don't deserve them because it makes the incoming class more racially diverse. That's really what his is all about. Ditching the SAT means fewer Asian kids get into Berkeley and more Black and Hispanic kids are accepted.

While other top schools (Harvard, MIT, Caltech, etc.) have brought back the SAT, the UC system is slow walking a decision.

While formally acknowledging concerns about student preparation, its practical response is to propose a 12-month process that “will investigate the advantages and disadvantages of relying on” the SAT, ACT and other tests, “as these tests may have evolved” since 2020. It “will provide recommendations about whether standardized tests should be used for admissions or not.”

This is how things work in California. Entire systems veer left in a hurry, but it takes a long time to admit those hastily revised systems have failed. So in the case of UC schools, they'll farm out the job of reaching the obvious conclusion to some blue ribbon commission that will need a year to say the thing everyone knows to be true (SAT's are necessary for admission to top schools). And when they do say it, it will be done in such a way that it seems like a new breakthrough rather than the exact thing that moderates and conservatives have been saying all along.

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