SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Second-year UC Berkeley student Anushka Kalyan said she remembers well taking both the SAT and ACT tests two years ago, for a good reason.

What You Need To Know

  • The debate over reinstating SAT and ACT scores in UC admissions has dominated this week's UC Regents meetings

  • More than 3,000 faculty signed open letters urging the Regents and Academic Senate to restore the tests

  • Scores as part of admissions were dropped during the pandemic in 2021

  • The decision by regents to omit those scores was also partly because of the argument that more financially stable students benefit from the test scores than those who are economically challenged

“So it is a process,” said Kalyan, who is studying both political economy and public health. “That’s definitely a good word for it because there’s a lot of studying. There is a lot of just kind of general knowledge to gain from it.”

Even though she didn’t need it for admission to a UC campus, Kalyan said she didn’t know where she’d ultimately enroll, so she took the test, anyway.

How she prepared for it.

“I took a lot of practice tests, and those are available publicly online,” Kalyan said. “My high school offered teacher tutoring services, so I used those. But, yeah, all the tests I took were publicly available, which was really helpful.”

The debate over reinstating SAT and ACT scores in UC admissions has dominated this week’s UC Regents meetings.

More than 3,000 faculty signed open letters urging the Regents and Academic Senate to restore the tests after they were dropped during the pandemic.

The policy sets UC apart from most Ivy League and other highly selective universities.

Under prepared students are being admitted to some courses, said UC Berkeley mathematics professor Zvezdelina Stankova.

“It hurts us to see students who come with algebra and even some elementary mathematics,” said Professor Stankova.

And it’s not just an issue for STEM courses, she said.

“We have almost 250 distinct disciplines represented on the open letters,” Stankova said. “And there is now a second letter, which is written by a social sciences faculty from UCLA.”

Another part of the decision regents chose to omit those scores is the argument that more financially stable students benefit from the test scores than those who are economically challenged, because of private tutoring, prep courses, and the like.

An outdated argument claims Stankova.

“We have Khan Academy, which is free and which offers excellent tutorials to prepare for SAT,” Stankova said. “The College Board itself has posted hundreds of exams.”

But the argument around access to resources is still valid, said Aditi Hariharan, president of the UC Student Association.

“If everyone has access to the free resource, but some people have access to paid resources, the paid resources folks might end up doing better,” Hariharan said. “And it still mirrors that initial inequity that was found when the SAT and ACT conversation was occurring.”

Making education accessible to as many as possible should be the goal, Hariharan said.

“The conversation shifting, trying to limit the number of students entering the UC, rather than how can we ensure that the resources that are available actually cater to every student seems extremely problematic to me,” Hariharan said.

The regent board chair has asked for a recommendation from faculty leadership by June next year.

Kalyan said she can see both sides, but when it comes to deciding on admitting a student, she said.

“Overall, I think that it should be very holistic in terms of how application readers submit a student,” Kalyan said.

As there are many factors, Kalyan said, that can lead one to succeed in a university environment.