Even California Academics Want to Reverse Wokeness

The fruits of another woke revolution are here—and even California academics are fed up.

In May 2020, weeks into the nation’s shutdown and days before George Floyd’s death, the University of California regents voted that applicants to the prestigious public higher education system would no longer need to submit SAT or ACT test scores.

“I believe the test is a racist test,” said Jonathan “Jay” Sures, one of the regents. “There’s no two ways about it.”

The initial vote, which was cast during the tenure of former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano as UC president, suspended the test score requirement through 2024. A lawsuit settled in 2021 required the University of California system, which serves over 230,000 undergraduate students, to not consider standardized tests for admissions through 2025.

But now, over 900 members of the University of California faculty have had enough, according to the UC Student Success site, which hosts an explosive new letter.

Hundreds of professors, including dozens of STEM department chairs, ask in the letter that the UC system start requiring STEM major applicants to submit either math SAT or ACT scores.

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Why?

Because the status quo is so broken that UC faculty are now teaching middle school—or even elementary—math skills to students old enough to vote.

At the University of California, San Diego, the number of students who had math skills below high school levels increased thirtyfold from 2020 to 2025, according to a 2025 report from a working group at the university. One out of 12 students didn’t even have math skills at a middle school level.

Yet looking at high school transcripts didn’t reveal how behind these students were. Forty-two percent of those students who were in the 2024 class and unable to do middle school math had taken precalculus or calculus in high school. Another 44% had taken a statistics class.

Without any SAT or ACT scores to provide context, admissions officers had no way of realizing how many students were taking classes but not bothering to learn anything.

As a result, UC San Diego is now teaching remedial math classes. Nor is it the only UC facing such challenges. “[F]or three consecutive years, 20%-30% of UC Berkeley first-semester calculus students who participated in mathematical diagnostic testing displayed severe preparation deficits,” states the letter.

Furthermore, these students’ poor grasp of math has implications for better-educated students. “[T]he widening spread between underprepared and well-prepared students creates polarized courses, weakening the foundation available to many students and making it harder to teach at the level required for advanced STEM work,” states the letter.

“UC is increasingly unable to provide its students with the education needed to become leaders in California’s scientific, technological, and economic future.”

But hey, even if California’s economy careens because there’s no workforce, at least the UC system is diverse, right?

Well, actually, it’s not so simple.

Sure, people blithely slap the racist label on standardized tests, as Jonathan “Jay” Sures did in 2020. But the reality is significantly more complicated.

“The SAT was originally designed to identify students who might not have had high [high school grade point averages] or attended elite or well-resourced high schools but who showed academic promise,” wrote members of a University of California task force in a January 2020 report.

“The SAT and ACT appear to play that role for many students at the UC today.”

Effectively, students who weren’t necessarily getting super-high GPAs at their high schools but were scoring well on standardized tests were still able to get into the UC system thanks to those test scores. Among the 2018 class, the task force identified about 22,000 who were admitted due to their SAT scores.

“Of these students for whom the SAT score was decisive in guaranteeing them admission to UC, 4,931 were low-income and 5,704 were first-generation college [students],” the report states, adding that “5,609 were underrepresented minorities (URMs), comprised of 4,442 Latino students, 999 African American students, and 168 Native American students.”

“This is a substantial proportion of these disadvantaged groups of students who would not have been guaranteed admission had they not had high SAT scores,” the report concludes.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given that finding, the task force recommended against suspending the standardized testing requirement.

But of course, in 2020, the year when performative gestures trumped reality from sea to shining sea, the University of California poohbahs decided the critical thing was to seem woke, not to defend the misunderstood impacts of using standardized tests.

Consider the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which ultimately took a different path. MIT suspended testing requirements for two years, citing the COVID-19 pandemic, but then reinstated the test requirement—and the results weren’t exactly what leftists would have predicted.

“Once we brought the test requirement back, we admitted the most diverse class that we ever had in our history,” Stu Schmill, dean of admissions, told The New York Times in 2024. “Having test scores was helpful.”

In that class, the Times reported, “15 percent of students are Black, 16 percent are Hispanic, 38 percent are white, and 40 percent are Asian American” and “[a]bout 20 percent receive Pell Grants, the federal program for lower-income students.”

Since then, MIT’s incoming classes have become less racially diverse—but that’s not because of the standardized tests. It’s because the institute overhauled its admissions approach after the 2023 Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard that ruled race-based admissions were illegal.

Interestingly, economic diversity is increasing—in the class of 2029, 27% of students at MIT were eligible for Pell Grants, a sharp increase.

Ultimately, too, while white liberals are prone to angst over standardized tests, that’s not the viewpoint of minorities themselves. Only about a fifth of black and Hispanic respondents believe that test scores shouldn’t be a factor in college admissions, according to a 2022 Pew Research Center survey. In contrast, 81% of Hispanics and 79% of black respondents believed standardized test scores should be a major or minor factor in college admissions.

Will UC bring back the standardized tests? This letter comes at a time when more and more colleges have reinstated testing requirements. Nor is that the only sign that higher education gurus are waking up to the fact that they have veered too far from prioritizing—or even caring about at all—academic excellence. Harvard faculty voted earlier this month to start limiting As to about 20% of students in any given class—which will be a major change for the college. Currently, about 63% of undergraduate grades are As, according to the student newspaper, The Crimson.

It’s not quite 2019 all over again yet. But when even professors at public California universities are calling for a return to (partial) sanity, it shows just how extreme the overreach of 2020 was.