The Scholastic Aptitude Tests (SAT) have been around forever and have never been held in less regard than now. Thanks to the past decade or so of intense advocacy for equity over quality, and race-grievances over education, the SATs have been the whipping boy for every anti-merit-based admissions policy foe that ever held a placard outside a college president's office, or worse - their home.
In many cases, those forces of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) prevailed, and the reviled and RACIST! SAT test became a thing of legend, as it was no longer required on applications for college entrance. No longer was it a metric to be judged by for acceptance into a program at a particular school.
No longer were scores on the test available for a school to know if an applicant was prepared to do the coursework that any given institution would require of them.
According to a post John wrote last November, the University of California system stopped accepting SATs in 2020. He said the fellow most responsible for that decision was named Paul Geiser, who, by 2025, was crowing about how diverse the campuses had become in the interim and how high the GPAs were.
John then pointed out that this is really terrific, only, hello - a quarter (!) of the students at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) can't do simple 5th-grade math problems, whatever their GPAs look like.
...It sounds great, but we know standards have slipped because 25% of students at UCSD can't solve 7 + 2 = ___ + 6 and 61% of students can't round 374,518 to the nearest hundred. Good grief, man! These are problems students should be able to solve by 5th grade. Academic standards have definitely slipped if incoming college freshman are stumped by these questions.
David, dear academic that he is, had a post along the same lines a week prior to John's, bemoaning the fact that what is arriving at college unprepared - and facilitated by this lack of testing - is being developed in middle and high school systems that have never recovered from dropping COVID-era math courses.
This pandering is criminal neglect.
...The pandemic is long over now but algebra still hasn't returned to some Middle Schools, grade inflation is still running rampant (even at places like Harvard), and the overwhelming majority of schools still treat the SAT as optional.
...There are a bunch of factors that played into the decline in student math scores, but a desire to ignore the achievement gap and create more racial equity is certainly one of the prominent ones. That same push also helps explain why students arriving at college can't do math like they used to. The ability to do math used to be seen as a sign of individual merit. Now schools treat it as a sign of the racial inequity that they need to overcome.
UCSD - ranked the nation's '5th best public university' by the - thanks to the exposure last fall of its absolutely stellar diversity standards and miserable academic ones - has become the poster child for everything ripe and rotten in higher education.
This is the example John used to show the state of the students' math skills. It's appalling.
UCSD’s “Math 2” course teaches grade-school math (grades 1–8) to freshmen. From page 49 of the university’s own report:
— Chris Brunet (@chrisbrunet) November 11, 2025
• 25% of students got 7 + 2 = ___ + 6 wrong
• 61% of students, a large majority, couldn’t round 374,518 to the nearest hundred
• 37% of students couldn't… https://t.co/GGDvrF5AIy pic.twitter.com/2WepqqnmWp
The fallout from that unpreparedness, which would have been mitigated by the winnowing out process of SAT scores, has been to shuffle better-qualified students, whatever their skin hue, to other universities to maintain an artificial color and gender mix.
A senior engineer colleague’s son who got an 800 on the math SAT and a 1500+ overall got into Merced only because Y chromosomes are not as popular as septum piercings and purple hair.
— Peter Kazanjy (@Kazanjy) February 13, 2026
This shit has to stop.
This is also criminal neglect on a massive scale of social engineering for all the students involved. According to that statistic on entering UCSD students, one in twelve of the cohort falls below middle school levels in math and is completely unprepared for the 'rigors' of the school they are attending.
..."Between 2020 and 2025, the number of students whose math skills fall below high school level increased nearly thirtyfold; moreover, 70% of those students fall below middle school levels, reaching roughly one in twelve members of the entering cohort."
"While Math 2 was designed in 2016 to remediate missing high school math knowledge, now most students had knowledge gaps that went back much further, to middle and even elementary school. To address the large number of underprepared students, the Mathematics Department redesigned Math 2 for Fall 2024 to focus entirely on elementary and middle school Common Core math subjects (grades 1-8), and introduced a new course, Math 3B, so as to cover missing high-school common core math subjects (Algebra I, Geometry, Algebra II or Math I, II, III; grades 9-11)."
The university, in effect, found it had to have remedial courses available that would reteach all TWELVE YEARS of pre-college math in an attempt to get these kids up to speed.
It's that bad.
What initially got me started on this today is, quite frankly, one of the saddest articles I've ever read. It's on Fox, and it's a cri de coeur from another professor in the California university system, this time Cal State, begging for the SATs to be reinstated. Cal State dropped its SAT requirement in 2022.
A California economics professor is sounding the alarm on the "deficits in learning" she is seeing in the classroom, arguing that the decision to scrap standardized testing in the name of "inclusivity" is actually a disservice to the students it claims to help.
Cal State Long Beach professor Andrea Mays told Fox News Digital that the current cohort of college students, many of whom spent their formative middle school years in online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, are arriving on campus unprepared for basic coursework.
I mean, the horror.
25% of students are dropping courses because they are completely overwhelmed by the math. Worse, they are completely overwhelmed by the remedial math courses, because they've never seen any of it.
...Mays says the drop rate is up "phenomenally" and that chairs of other departments tell her it's widespread, with 25% of students dropping classes, with math being a key area where students are coming in underprepared.
"I teach a class that is offered for non-economics majors," Mays explained. "I could put on an index card exactly what math is required for my class, it's not calculus, and they are struggling with it, they're embarrassed, they're demoralized, they come into my classroom, and they say, or into my office hours, and they say, I never learned this stuff, I don't know how to calculate a percentage change."
..."Not all high schools are excellent even if they say they are. And so you'll get students who get As in algebra two, and then they come into my class and they can't calculate a percentage change. They can't find the intersection between two straight lines, both of which are seventh and eighth grade math requirements. So that students are getting passed on from high school into a four-year university is a disservice to them. They get here thinking they're wonderful and finding out that they are at the bottom of the ability distribution for math and English."
As Professor Mays says in her original op-ed, it's a waste of everyone's time, a detriment to the student and the university's reputation, and most of all, a brutal motivational blow to a young person who is struggling and had been told they were golden.
She argues that a solid metric for determining that a student is prepared to succeed by having mastery of the prerequisite skills to take a course is far more important than the mix in the classroom who will inevitably fail for lack of prior knowledge.
...Without any meaningful diagnostic, students are told by adults they trust that they are “college-ready” without knowing whether that is true. College faculty are then forced to spend instructional time reteaching basic math and writing, which detracts from the advanced material a college course is meant to deliver. Curricula become diluted, instructors grow frustrated, and students feel embarrassed struggling with material they believe they should already know.
The consequences extend beyond the classroom. Employers expect CSU graduates to possess basic quantitative reasoning and written communication skills. When academic standards are quietly lowered to accommodate underprepared students, the harm spreads to all graduates. Degrees lose credibility, and the CSU’s reputation in the job market suffers, especially in Southern California where employers have many alternatives.
Pretending preparation gaps do not exist is not equity. Equity means providing early signals and targeted remediation, not admitting students into programs for which they are unprepared and hoping they catch up. Doing so shifts the burden onto students — in wasted time, accumulated debt, and diminished confidence — while allowing institutions to claim success, patting ourselves on the back based on enrollment alone.
The CSU system holds a public trust: to offer access to a four-year degree that employers, graduate schools, and society can rely upon. By abandoning standardized diagnostics without a viable replacement, CSU violates that trust. Reinstating the SAT or ACT — or another rigorous, systemwide assessment — does not lock students out of higher education. It gives them honest information, clearer pathways, and a better chance to succeed.
Her recommendation, as she can't change the public school system, is to reinstate the SAT and for prospective university students to utilize their local community college as their test ground.
It's sound advice for spending a small amount of time to perhaps save major pain later.
...Mays told Fox News Digital that California’s robust and effective community college system is a tool ready to be utilized as an "alternative" for students who are coming out of high school, many who lost years of learning during COVID, and not prepared for college.
"Go into the community system and take the lowest level English class you can so that you can write a sentence, you can write a paragraph, you could make an argument," Mays said. "Take a basic math class that will transfer onto a four-year university and learn how to do the basic math that perhaps you didn't learn when you were in middle school online."
A student would still be knocking out credits without being knocked out of the competition themselves and feeling utterly hopeless.
I hope Professor Mays can get more of her colleagues to join her in advocating for change.
Before we have an entire generation and then some who can't make change working a counter job if the computer goes down.
It's just criminal.
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