Actually, the SAT Was Necessary After All - The Atlantic

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This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.<br>Updated at 2:56 p.m. ET on June 9, 2026<br>Zvezdelina Stankova has taught mathematics at UC Berkeley for nearly three decades. But in 2023, while teaching introductory calculus for the first time since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, she noticed that something was quite wrong. The bottom 25 percent of students were not just struggling with the coursework, Stankova told me; “people were in freefall.” Teaching was becoming impossible. “With one hand, I am teaching a complex integral, and with the other hand, I am telling them how to solve a simple linear equation like 7x – 2 = 5,” Stankova said.<br>Mina Aganagic, a string theorist at Berkeley who has taught calculus for 20 years, noticed something similar. “I realized that for students to follow me,” she told me, “I had to start reviewing basic algebra stuff, like fractions.” The lack of mathematical fluency, Aganagic said, extended even to “the meaning of equals in an equation.” Both professors said their students came to office hours and still tried hard to pass—often by trying to commit equations to memory when they could not understand them. But however hard they worked, most of the students who arrived to calculus class without knowing algebra failed.<br>Stankova and Aganagic believed they knew why the bottom had fallen out of their calculus classes—and it wasn’t just that the coronavirus had disrupted their incoming students’ high-school math classes. The entire University of California system abandoned the use of standardized tests in admissions during the pandemic and, unlike many of its peer institutions, has neither restored their use nor announced any plans to do so.<br>Late last month, Stankova and Aganagic, along with three other Berkeley professors, published an open letter arguing for the reinstatement of those testing requirements—at least for any students seeking science, technology, engineering, and mathematics degrees. “Basic mathematical fluency is analogous to literacy; without it, success in university-level STEM becomes structurally unattainable for students,” they wrote. Their letter came only six months after UC San Diego released a shocking report finding that one in 12 of its incoming students struggled with even middle-school math. Since the letter’s publication, more than 1,400 professors and lecturers have co-signed it.<br>Rose Horowitch: American kids can’t do math anymore<br>In other words, a huge share of STEM and economics faculty across the UC system is now in open revolt—demanding that California’s public universities at least look at standardized-test scores before offering admission. The rupture was years in the making, after a policy change meant to promote equity collided with the practical realities of teaching calculus to students who struggle with basic algebra even at some of America’s premier scientific universities.<br>The UC-faculty rebellion may well succeed: David Volz, a professor at UC Riverside who chairs the faculty committee in charge of undergraduate admissions, told me that the system is setting up a working group to study whether to reinstate standardized-exam requirements. (Another working group will examine the high-school course requirements for admissions. UC officials say both panels were in the works before the open letter.) But any recommendations will likely take at least a year, leaving the university system in a bind.<br>The unending debates about standardized tests long ago became kabuki. They are not really about whether knowledge of trigonometry is latent classism, but about the trade-offs that selective universities are forced to make in balancing academic excellence with efforts to serve underprivileged applicants.<br>Supporters see tests such as the SAT as objective measures of academic preparation, allowing comparison among students no matter how varied their actual schooling. Tests can help identify the excellent students attending mediocre high schools and, conversely, the mediocre students attending excellent schools.<br>Rather than interpreting these gaps as a barometer of educational inequality, critics cast standardized tests as oppressive tools in their own right, because they reinforce inequality. Because the tests were correlated with privilege, the argument goes, they must simply be measures of privilege itself. Yet the same objection could be levied at all of the other materials used in college admissions—high-school transcripts, essays, lists of extracurricular activities—which also favor students from wealthy, well-educated families.<br>Standardized tests are deeply entangled in the debate over affirmative action. Selective universities used race-based preferences in admissions to promote demographic diversity within their student body; these preferences were supposed to be small. But tests provided a quantitative measure...