A group of University of California math and science professors just sent a letter to campus leadership with a blunt message: incoming students no longer understand middle school math. Not “struggle with calculus” — can’t handle fractions, basic algebra, foundational concepts that used to be settled by eighth grade. Nearly a third of UC Berkeley’s first-semester calculus students now display what the faculty diplomatically called “severe preparation deficits.”
Their proposed solution? Bring back mandatory SAT and ACT scores for admissions. UC dropped the requirement in 2020 during the pandemic — along with 90 percent of other schools — and the professors argue the results speak for themselves. Elite institutions like MIT, Harvard, Dartmouth, and Yale have already reversed course and reinstated testing requirements. UC hasn’t budged.
The problem with this diagnosis: it treats a compound fracture with a Band-Aid.
The SAT Debate Misses the Actual Crisis
Standardized tests have always been controversial — and for good reason. Wealthier students (usually white) are thirteen times more likely to score high on the SAT or ACT than kids from low-income families, according to Harvard-led research. The exams aren’t free. Prep courses aren’t free. Access to rigorous coursework that actually prepares students for those exams isn’t evenly distributed. Reinstating a requirement doesn’t magically fix preparation gaps — it just filters out students who couldn’t afford to close them.
But the UC professors aren’t wrong about the severity of the problem. When calculus instructors have to reteach middle school math while simultaneously covering college-level material, something has collapsed at a structural level. The question isn’t whether students are underprepared — they demonstrably are. The question is why, and whether a test score would have prevented this.
AI Didn’t Create This Problem, But It Accelerated the Rot
ChatGPT launched in late 2022. By 2023, grade inflation in courses vulnerable to AI cheating — humanities and engineering — surged by 30 percent. Students who used ChatGPT to write essays showed lower brain activity in areas associated with creativity compared to students who used Google or no external help. Heavy AI use correlates with impaired critical thinking and memory retention. Cheating is rampant. Actual learning is optional.
But AI didn’t invent grade inflation or academic dishonesty — it just made both frictionless and nearly undetectable. The deeper issue is that the education system spent decades optimizing for metrics (test scores, GPAs, college acceptance rates) instead of actual comprehension. When the pandemic hit, schools abandoned even the pretense of rigor. Remote learning was a disaster for most students. Standards evaporated. And now, four years later, the bill has come due.
The Real Problem Isn’t Testing — It’s That Nobody Wants to Admit the System Is Broken
Reinstating the SAT won’t teach students algebra. It won’t reverse years of social promotion, where kids advance to the next grade regardless of whether they’ve mastered the previous one. It won’t address the fact that many high schools have effectively outsourced critical thinking to AI tools that students don’t understand and teachers can’t police. It won’t fix the reality that “college-ready” has become a hollow credential.
What it will do is create a convenient sorting mechanism — one that allows universities to blame high schools, high schools to blame middle schools, and everyone to avoid confronting the systemic rot. The UC professors are right that they can’t reteach foundational math to a third of their incoming class. But the solution isn’t gatekeeping — it’s rebuilding the pipeline so students actually learn the material the first time.
That requires uncomfortable conversations about grade inflation, about the incentive structures that reward schools for graduation rates over competency, about the fact that AI tools are being integrated into classrooms by administrators who took Big Tech money without considering the long-term consequences. It requires admitting that the emperor has no clothes — and hasn’t for years.
What Happens Next
UC will probably hold the line on test-optional admissions, at least for now. The optics of reinstating a requirement widely seen as discriminatory are too toxic, especially in California. Other schools will continue the reversal — MIT, Harvard, Yale aren’t outliers anymore. The split will deepen. And students caught in the middle will keep arriving at college unprepared for coursework that assumes they’ve mastered concepts they were never actually taught.
The UC professors’ letter is a symptom, not a diagnosis. The real crisis isn’t that students can’t pass the SAT — it’s that they’re graduating high school without understanding fractions. Fixing that requires more than a test score. It requires admitting the system failed, then doing the unglamorous work of rebuilding it from the ground up.
Nobody’s in a hurry to start.