Monday, July 27, 2026

Guest Opinion | Dr. Jessica Cobb and Mo Hyman: The SAT/ACT is a Relic of the Past. California’s Resilient Students Are the Future.

Dr. Jessica Cobb and Mo Hyman [Courtesy photos]

Calls to add SAT/ACT scores to University of California admissions have reached a fever pitch, with droves of UC faculty signing online petitions and the New York Times editorial board weighing in from across the country. But third-party standardized tests do not measure students’ UC-readiness, and they will not fix skills gaps in US education. What the SAT/ACT does is block highly qualified low-income students and students of color – our students – from attending selective colleges. And that’s the point. Excluding more of our students is the UC faculty’s stated aim.

The current fuss over UC admissions began with two reports prepared by UC San Diego faculty. The first, by the Workgroup on Math Preparation, is a thoughtful piece, identifying an increase of students taking remediation courses and considering multiple options to improve those students’ ultimate college success, including supplemental instruction and better faculty assignment. 

The second, widely-cited, report by the UCSD Workgroup on Admissions, also focuses on students who need math remediation, but with the goal of reducing their admission.  Because low-income students and students of color are overrepresented in remediation, the workgroup names an explicit goal of shrinking those populations, regardless of students’ previous success in college-preparatory math courses.  The report does not study whether the SAT/ACT is an appropriate tool for identifying students who are calculus-ready; instead, it embraces the SAT/ACT as an efficient tool to limit admissions of historically disadvantaged students.

They’re right. The SAT/ACT is good at excluding low-income students and students of color from high-quality, public education opportunities. That’s why we sued the UC Board of Regents in 2019 to move toward test-free admissions. And that’s why we’re sounding the alarm again. 

The SAT/ACT is an unnecessary and discriminatory hurdle to college admissions. UC-specific research consistently shows that the test is tightly correlated with race and class and only loosely correlated with college grades past freshman year. The current counter-argument relies on one study that only examines students admitted to elitist, grade-inflated “Ivy Plus” schools. Test prep access remains deeply stratified, with middle-class and high-income kids paying ever more to increase their odds of admission, despite the availability of free tools like Khan Academy.

Just as important as these data are the experiences of the first-generation students, low-income students, and students of color we serve in our college access programs. Our students deserve to spend their time on real learning, not gaming high-stakes exams. Those students include four high school seniors who, even after losing their homes in the devastating Eaton Fire, logged forty volunteer hours helping others with their college applications and enrollment; another completed her volunteer hours after her father was kidnapped by ICE. They include a young woman who worked in a pizza parlor twenty hours a week to pay her rent and somehow still found time to ace her AP classes and star in the school musical. 

This is the crux of the problem. Skills gaps in UC math and English classes are symptomatic of a much larger issue that regressive admissions formulas cannot solve. Today’s students have been battered by wave after wave of educational disruption: the COVID-19 pandemic, ICE raids on families, housing precarity, the advent of AI, and climate disasters. These disruptions fall especially hard on disadvantaged students. They should not be penalized for their resilience. The University of California must find a way to meet these challenges with the same tenacity, compassion, and purpose that their young applicants display day after day.

The good news is, California already has a number of evidence-backed mechanisms to improve student success in college-level math and English without sacrificing equity in access. The California Community Colleges’ AB 705 is a model for effective remediation that eliminates flawed placement tests and replaces stultifying pre-requisites with targeted concurrent supports. A similar approach could help the UCs increase belonging and reduce time to degree completion. UCs should also immediately enable students to validate their high school grades in college-preparatory math by submitting their Smarter Balanced Summative Assessment scores.

Finally, the University of California has ready partners in the state’s K-12 schools and community colleges. The UCs should commit to supporting K-12 community schooling. They should increase transfer admissions from the California Community Colleges. And they should invest in equitable dual enrollment, opening the door to more students receiving college English and math credit while still in high school.

The University of California is still the country’s most competitive public university system. The coming debate will decide whether it remains the most innovative and progressive, or if it falls in line with the current trend of “anti-woke” retrenchment. As the UC Academic Senate reconsiders the admissions process, we call on the faculty to center their mission of public service. Through intellectual rigor and partner engagement, the University of California has the potential to develop admissions policies that lead the nation in assessing student fit without reproducing disadvantage. Falling back on the SAT/ACT will serve neither students nor the systems that educate the leaders of tomorrow.

Jessica Cobb, Ph.D., is an advocate for educational justice whose career bridges academic scholarship, policy research, and program development. She has served on the board of College Access Plan since 2015.

Mo Hyman is the Executive Director and co-founder of College Access Plan, a writer, and an advocate for equitable access to postsecondary education. She is a proud former adjunct Associate Professor of English at two California Community Colleges.

About College Access Plan

Founded in 2006, College Access Plan (CAP) is an independent 501c3 nonprofit that prepares underserved and underrepresented students to succeed in college. Through partnerships with area school districts and local agencies, CAP provides no-cost college readiness advising and topic-specific courses for high school and middle school students, families, and graduates who attend college. In 2019, CAP, along with co-plaintiffs, sued the University of California for its use of racially and socioeconomically biased entrance exams in admissions and scholarship decisions.