Saul Geiser recently argued in Inside Higher Ed that the SAT is a “poor fit” for public universities and that high school GPA is a stronger, fairer predictor of college success. That argument might have been defensible a decade ago—before widespread grade inflation, before transcripts became inflated signals increasingly unmoored from demonstrated competency and before the University of California ran a failed experiment eliminating standardized tests.

Today, his argument ignores what is happening in real time.

Nowhere is that clearer than in the recent Senate-Administration Working Group on Admissions report from the University of California, San Diego—written not by testing companies, lobbyists or political actors, but by UCSD’s own faculty and administrators.

What it reveals is not subtle.

Since the UC system eliminated SAT and ACT requirements in 2020, UCSD reports a nearly 30-fold increase in students arriving without high school–level math skills: According to the report, one in eight students are testing below the high school level and one in 12 are not even meeting middle school math standards. The university has had to redesign its remedial courses to reteach fractions and elementary arithmetic.

That is not equity. It is denial.

Geiser argues eliminating tests “level[s] the playing field.” But based on UCSD’s numbers, the reality is simpler.

We didn’t level the playing field. We turned off the scoreboard.

The Data Is In—And It’s Not Ambiguous

The UCSD working group report identifies several forces behind the collapse in readiness:

• The elimination of standardized testing
• Grade inflation
• COVID learning disruption
• Changes in UCSD’s enrollment composition, including a “surge” of students admitted from underresourced high schools and an increase in the proportion of California resident students

The latter three forces collided at precisely the moment UC removed its only cross-school comparison tool—standardized tests.

That doesn’t mean testing caused the collapse. It means eliminating testing removed the alarm bell that would have detected it. When students with 4.0 GPAs in high school math are testing into middle school–level remediation, something is clearly broken.

As the report bluntly states, “admitting large numbers of underprepared students risks harming those students and straining limited instructional resources.”

If high school grades were sufficient, UCSD would not be hiring tutors to reteach fractions.

To be clear: The students who are struggling are not the problem. They were told they were ready when they weren’t. Public universities have a moral and civic obligation to tell the truth early—not after tuition checks are signed and students are in over their heads. You do not change lives by removing standards, lowering expectations or pretending academic preparation is optional.

The issue is not whether UC should return to standardized tests. The issue is whether UC wants to measure reality—or pretend it doesn’t exist.

Reinstating standardized testing as one metric—contextualized, as Massachusetts Institute of Technology and others now do—alongside GPA, school profile, coursework access and academic support is a sensible, ready-made solution.

Because the point of measurement is not exclusion. The point of measurement is intervention.

Measurement tells us who is ready to begin college-level work—and it tells us who deserves support to get there. When students arrive prepared, they can invest their time and tuition dollars in actual college learning. When students arrive with foundational gaps, honest measurement allows them to address those gaps before they find themselves overwhelmed by material they were never prepared for.

Standardized tests have flaws—every human-designed tool does. But pretending they offer nothing of value because they reveal inequities between ZIP codes is the educational equivalent of breaking the thermometer because you don’t like the temperature.

The tests are not the inequity; they expose inequity. They reveal which schools are preparing students and which high schools are graduating them unprepared for the world they’re walking into.

UC Has a Dual Mandate—and Dropping Tests Broke the Balance

Geiser is right about one thing: Public universities are meant to expand access.

But that is only half the mission.

The University of California has always operated on a dual mandate:

1. Be centers of excellence.
2. Be engines of social mobility.

When those priorities are balanced, California wins.

For decades, UC pulled this off. Standardized tests were one of the tools—not the only tool, but a necessary one—to distinguish the student who earned A’s at a rigorous school from the student earning A’s at a school where passing students forward is incentivized over real learning.

As MIT discovered when it reinstated the SAT, standardized tests are often the only signal available for students whose schools lack Advanced Placement Calculus, other advanced coursework or college counseling.

Once UC removed testing and relied primarily on GPA alone, that balance collapsed.

The number of seats did not increase when tests disappeared. Which means this is not expanding opportunity—instead, it may be replacing prepared students with students with major skill gaps.

That doesn’t fulfill the mobility mission. It breaks it.

And Here’s the Contradiction

Without standardized test data, UC now struggles to keep its dual mission in balance—excellence and access. And the students squeezed the most are prepared California students who worked hard, earned the grades and used to be recognized for it.

UC leaders routinely defend large numbers of international and out-of-state enrollments in the name of maintaining “excellence” (purely coincidental, of course, that those students pay two to three times more in tuition). But prepared, in-state students—whose families’ tax dollars helped build these campuses—may find themselves locked out of admission. Because many of these students did not attend officially “underresourced” high schools, they are not counted as social mobility admits. In a system without standardized measures, they fall into a newly created black hole of admission: not wealthy outsiders, not counted as equity admits—just overlooked.

Meanwhile, deeply unprepared students are not being set up for success. The UCSD report notes that students who place into Math 2 (the lowest level of remedial math) “have a relatively high D, F or Withdraw (‘DFW’) rate” in the subsequent Math 10 series, including in a calculus course, Math 10B, that is required for the B.S. in psychology major and most biology majors. The report also states that “few, if any” students who place into Math 2 have successfully completed an engineering degree.

Admitting students who haven’t mastered middle school math into a world-class engineering program is not equity—it’s fantasy. And fantasy is not a strategy.

The UC System Can Lead Again

Again, this crisis is not the fault of students. It is the result of institutions that lacked the courage to measure honestly and speak plainly. Leadership is not redefining success to avoid discomfort—leadership is building pathways so more students can reach it.

And real leadership means solving the problem at its source, not obscuring it at the college gate.

If we want more students from underresourced schools to thrive at UC, the solution is not to remove the measurement—it is to invest in the preparation. That begins with pouring resources into K–12 schools that are failing in their basic charge through no fault of the children they serve. It means strengthening partnerships with community colleges—the most scalable, affordable and equitable on-ramp in the state—where remediation can happen early, inexpensively and with clear momentum toward a UC degree.

It won’t produce glossy headlines or overnight diversity statistics. But it will produce what matters far more: students who arrive prepared, confident and capable of finishing what they start.

The UC system changed higher education once before by proving that excellence and access could coexist. It can do so again. But leadership begins by facing reality, not fleeing from it. If the goal is not merely to enroll students but to graduate them—not to claim opportunity but to deliver it — then restoring honest measurement is not optional. You cannot call it equity when the result is predictable failure. You cannot fix what you refuse to measure.

Measurement is step one.