How stupid? A LOT!
Who would have thought that when colleges use academic skills and achievement testing for admissions, that the result would be students that are ready and able to do college-level work? Mind-blowing logic. But logic isn’t the strong suit of social justice warriors.
It used to be the case that teachers at ALL levels of schooling were smart, well-educated and dedicated to academic excellence. In decades past, the majority of high school students did not go to college but were well-educated for life. But that was before teacher unions took hold of the “profession”, and before radicals took over universities and sent teacher education down the fad-pedagogy and progressive racist/victim/equity/social justice holes.
It looks like STEM professors at University of California schools are protesting.
University of California faculty say that when tests were dropped, student learning fell.
Editorial Board.Excerpt: Six years ago, in the 2020 year of progressive pandemic madness, the University of California led the Ivory Tower movement to drop standardized tests as an admissions requirement in the name of equity. The experiment has been a failure, as more than 750 professors in STEM disciplines across the UC system now admit in a cri de coeur to reverse course.
“We now observe preparation gaps so severe that instructors must reteach middle-school mathematics while simultaneously teaching the material students need for sciences, engineering, economics, and other quantitatively demanding fields,” the professors write in an open letter to the Board of Regents signed by seven of nine chairs of UC math departments.
“Failing to measure preparation gaps does not remove barriers; it moves them into the classroom, where they become harder to overcome,” the professors write. “Obscuring preparation gaps harms both students individually and the University collectively. It offers the appearance of access while undermining the chance of success.”
A major goal of eliminating the test requirement was to end-run the state constitutional ban on race-based preferences. Another was to obscure educational disparities caused by the state’s union-run public-school system that disproportionately harm minorities.
Wall Street Journal, June 1 2026
University of California Professors Are Begging Schools to Reinstate the SAT
Open letter cites ‘severe preparation deficits’ among incoming students
More than 1,100 University of California math and science professors are urging UC regents to reinstate college-entrance exams, saying that unprepared students are lowering academic standards and draining teaching resources.
The request, delivered in a two-page letter last week, cites a sharp decline in readiness among students studying science, technology, engineering and math. Nearly one-third of students taking first-semester calculus at UC Berkeley “displayed severe preparation deficits,” the letter said.
Wall Street Journal - Letters June 9, 2026
Requiring the SAT Test Boosts Student Success
After we started requiring entrance exams at Chapman University, graduation rates more than doubled.
Excerpt: The reason for our low graduation rate [at Chapman University] wasn’t hard to find. We found across a large sample of competing schools that the correlation between entrance-exam scores and graduation rates was more than double that for any other admission requirement, including high-school GPAs and class standing.
Those findings led us to require SAT/ACT entrance exams. We steadily increased the minimum admission score over the 25 years I served as president. That strategy worked: Our graduation rate more than doubled to 79% over that same period. Even more important, our faculty told me that raising the academic bar resulted in a more vibrant classroom experience and a richer campus life.
Jim Doti
Former president, Chapman University
