Comment by somenameforme
19 hours ago
The likely 'real' reason is hidden in one paragraph within the article and has nothing to do with the implication of the eye-catching title: "Both Garcia and Ranade have joined more than 1,300 UC faculty in signing a petition calling for the reinstatement of ACT and SAT standardized testing scores for STEM admissions in the UC system. The petition and its accompanying open letter detail similar concerns with students’ mathematical preparation."
Around COVID times many top universities experimented with removing test requirements from admissions, under an argument largely related to equity. It's been a failure everywhere, with many, if not most, universities already reversing it. As Yale put it, "Yale’s research from before and after the pandemic has consistently demonstrated that, among all application components, test scores are the single greatest predictor of a student’s future Yale grades. This is true even after controlling for family income and other demographic variables, and it is true for subject-based exams such as AP and IB, in addition to the ACT and SAT." [1]
That link is for an archive because that page has been removed. That's because they briefly experimented with a new 'test flexible' strategy where they allowed students to submit test scores or not, but then scrapped that altogether and went back to simply requiring test scores.
[1] - https://archive.is/8zxfo
Berkeley chancellor told students to vote for 2020 California Proposition 16, which would've repeated 1996 Proposition 209 that banned race-based admission in public universities. Prop 16 failed. Subsequently, Cal started ignoring SAT/ACT scores. I have to think this was their alternative way of taking fewer Asian students, who average highest on that. Soon after I got an email from the same chancellor praising the change for bringing more racial diversity. The email included before and after numbers where % Asian decreased and all others increased.
Reminds me of this asian professor getting blocked for promotion, allegedly, on the basis of race, but in a roundabout way. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/professor-sues-texas-unive...
Yes, they falsely classified him as white in order to deny him the promotion (because discriminating against white people is 100% non-controversial in that environment)
1 reply →
They could have easily made test scores a pass/fail per program and not weight higher scores for admission purposes. It achieves the goal of ensuring students have requisite knowledge for the program while not favoring students who are able to ace the test.
Or, even better - just expand programs so they can accept more students who pass the test. This would probably improve diversity without artificially restricting access to highish performers.
To expand the UC system to accommodate everyone who could do the work would require repealing Prop 13, much harder.
(minor typo: repeated --> repealed. Sorry for the nitpicking but it confused me when I first read it)
No that's valid to call out, thanks
If the removal of standardized testing in 2021 was the real reason, then why is there a sudden spike of failure rates happening right now?
https://senate.ucsd.edu/media/740347/sawg-report-on-admissio...
Please see the graph "Growth of the Math 2 Population by Major (2019-2024)". UCSD's Math 2 class is remedial high-school level maths. It has grown from under 100 students in 2016-2020, to more and more people each year starting from 2021.
UCSD tested the people who took this class, and 25% of them could not answer the question "Fill in the box: 7 + 2 = [_] + 6" (with only pencil and paper allowed, no calculators or other electronics)
this is a Berkeley CS class, not a remedial math class.
1 reply →
It takes time to work through the system and it has been steadily getting worse.
It was already discussed on HN.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48309233
I'm having a difficult time imagining how an admissions event in 2021 materializes in the spring semester of 2026 in a class largely taken by first-year students.
Could you explain?
17 replies →
That's not what this actual data shows. While there has been an increase math deficiency, the increase in failure rates happened recently and probably only partially related to the math preparation issue.
I think we will make a major mistake if we think math preparation fixes this - especially in CS classes where AI literally calls out to be used for projects. And it certainly doesn't explain me hearing the same problems are happening at MIT -- they just are being a bit wiser about "catching students" (or rather not doing so).
I'm guessing the kids who didn't do the standardized tests at/shortly after 2021 were already prepared for it.
The kids who saw the removal of standardized testing 3 years out from going to college never bothered.
It takes time for students to work their way through the system.
In the spring, but not the fall?
Wouldn’t this change be evidenced right away after the elimination of the test as criteria if the test was responsible
3 replies →
There's always a lag between cause and effect in education.
Works the other way too - if you introduce something positive in grade 1, you'll only see the results a few years later.
If it's a lagging effect, then why is the year-over-year spike in failure rates happening not just in 1st/2nd year classes, but also in a 3rd/4th year class at the same time?
2 replies →
Testing was the annoying flood barrier. AI is the rainstorm that shows why it was necessary.
This pattern reads heavily LLM in style, but also... that is spot on.
I'm not American so maybe I am missing some context. But how did admissions work without test scores?
> how did admissions work without test scores?
They look at "life experience" factors. Grades, of course, but also extracurricular activities such as school clubs, volunteering, activism, socioeconomic background and so forth.
The aim was to include as many varieties of these factors as possible in the student population to boost diversity without directly referencing skin color (which would be illegal).
There's a lot of antipathy towards standardized tests as things that disadvantage kids who don't test well, despite it being much cheaper and less time intensive to prepare for the test than it is to join a bunch of clubs and spend your weekends volunteering.
It turns out that removing the standardized testing requirement led to a lot of students wasting their money on courses that they weren't at all prepared to take.
It varies by school. I went to a (low ranking) state engineering school and it was guaranteed entry if a prospect met the following criteria:
- Had high school diploma (or equivalent).
- Resident of the state for >6 months (student or one parent).
- ACT score of something like 21. With provisional admission granted to students with scores below, until they completed all first year engineering courses with a B or better.
So likely they just dropped the concept of provisional admission. All that did was open up classes for registration a week later to ensure other students were able to get their preferred class openings. Provisional had to take the scrap classes, like the four-hour, once a week Calc class on Friday night.
Not American either, but in the US many schools use/used standardized admission tests (SAT/ACT) on top of things like HS GPA/grades.
There are many countries, especially in Europe, where entrance/admission tests are not a thing.
Yeah, in England only certain universities like Oxford and certain subjects like Mathematics have separate entrance exams.
That said, the Sixth Form exams are mostly standardised with only a few different exam boards for the entire country, so the Sixth Form grades end up being something akin to standardised tests anyway.
Excellent question. Sorry that's not allowed. DEI is the name of the game.
They look at high school transcripts and the application essays. I don't know how they decide based on those.
Primarily your high school GPA, the average of your grades across 4 years of high school. Which arguably is a better indicator than a single test that you can test for.
The problem is if you have a high school with low standards you're getting A's when you didn't deserve them.
[flagged]
>We used a vibes based system based on how compelling a sob story you could concoct whilst staying on the good side of fraud.
Besides lost meritocracy, that is accidentally filtering for ability and willingness to manipulate others emotionally. Which feels really scary.
3 replies →
Your comment sounds vibes-based
1 reply →
Somehow majority of Ivy League students don't have those sob stories and did not had for last years either?
> top universities experimented with removing test requirements from admissions
What could go wrong...
SAT requirement was dropped in 2021.
Not taking the SAT doesn't explain a jump from 10% F's in 2025 to 35% F's in 2026.
But do these universities not have math placement exams? Not for admissions but just before you register for your first semester classes, a 30 minute math test should be a straightforward preventative measure. I did a test like this, I assumed they were pretty universal.
They do -- this is often how they've found that students needed additional math coursework before starting the standard curriculum.
> Around COVID times many top universities experimented with removing test requirements from admissions, under an argument largely related to equity. It's been a failure everywhere, with many, if not most, universities already reversing it.
It's the universities that have failed. They've restricted admissions to a set of people who would learn no matter what the schools did, which is what makes them lazy.
When confronted with a set of students who haven't been provided with an enormous amount of childhood reading material, and the time, encouragement and social acceptance to indulge in it (the most faithful test predictor is childhood pleasure reading, the next best is parental income), they fail horribly.
The purpose of elite colleges for students is credentialism and networking, the purpose for the schools themselves is to force cultural conformity onto smart or extremely pressured students. They generally just tell you to go learn things by yourself. They have no particular insight into teaching, because they are supplied with students who don't need to be taught.
Can you cite a source for the claim about "most faithful test predictor"? I'm genuinely curious. I would think high school GPA would be more predictive.
High school grades are not evenly applied, and sometimes heavily inflated. Eliminating that variable is the whole point behind taking a standardized test.
I think IQ tests are even better.
Also interested
Memorize trivia and formulas, regurgitate trivia and formulas. This summarizes my experience with our system of education. Yale saying test scores predict performance reads to me as, “students’ history of being able to regurgitate trivia and formulas in high school is the lead predictor of their ability to do so here.”
> removing test requirements from admissions, under an argument largely related to equity. It's been a failure everywhere [...] among all application components, test scores are the single greatest predictor of a student’s future Yale grades.
It reads as though you tried to use the quote to support your conclusion that "it's been a failure", but the quote and the original rationale are optimising for different things. Something can be a success in improving equal opportunity while still leading to worse grades.
Or to flip it around: we could say admission testing "has been a failure everywhere" because it biases admissions in favour of certain demographics. But that wouldn't really be a fair assessment because being free of demographic biases is not the purpose of admission testing!