Say you’re tasked with evaluating a high school senior.

Here’s your criteria: their high school, their sophomore and junior year transcripts, a maximum 1,400 words of their writing, their extracurricular activities and the classes they plan to take senior year. If they went to a school that offered Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate classes, you could look at a score – graded on a scale of one to five or one to seven, respectively – for those exams, too.

Are you ready to admit them to the greatest public university system in the world?

According to the UC Board of Regents, you should be.

Since 2021, UC admissions officers have considered more than 200,000 candidates per year based on these limited metrics. It all started when the UC Regents voted to phase out the SAT and ACT in undergraduate admissions, citing performance disparities along racial and socioeconomic lines.

Six years later, it’s clear that what arose as a noble effort to ensure equity in accessing the UC has fallen short. Since eliminating standardized testing, the UC hasn’t made any significant diversity gains, but it has seen glaring rollbacks in student preparedness. Nobody should be happy with that result.

Come June 2027, the Regents have the chance to reverse it. It’s crucial for the success of their students – and the preservation of their University’s teaching mission – that they do.

The data is difficult to dispute. Standardized tests are up to four times more predictive of college grades than a student’s high school GPA. A 2025 report from UC San Diego reflected that reality, finding that the number of students with math skills below high school level increased nearly thirtyfold between 2020-25. More than 70% of those students fell below middle school levels. While COVID-19 also likely played a role in that nosedive, no other elite universities – or their faculty – are reporting such massive setbacks among their students.

A necessary reckoning followed that bombshell report. In June, thousands of UC STEM faculty – including five Nobel laureates and 73 department chairs – signed a letter calling for the Regents to reinstate the standardized tests. The professors corroborated the UCSD report’s worrying trends and assigned them a clear culprit: the UC’s admissions practices. Eliminating standardized testing, the professors argued, has not removed educational barriers, but brought them “into the classroom, where they become harder to overcome.” Hundreds of humanities professors have also signed on to a similar letter, released days after the initial one.

It’s not difficult to understand how we got here. Banning admissions officers from considering the most reliable predictor of college grades left them with criteria that is far too limited to determine a student’s preparedness.

High school grades are inflated. One study found that the average high school GPA increased from 3.22 to 3.39 between 2010 and 2021, but the average ACT composite score decreased by nearly a point. Extracurricular activities say something about students’ ambitions and passions but little about their academic preparation for college. More students are using artificial intelligence to write admissions essays, a component of the application process that correlates with household income even more than the SAT.

UC campuses such as UCLA and UC Berkeley select about 10% of applicants from a pool of more than 100,000. Test-blind admissions makes the process akin to picking a name out of a hat.

To be sure, the Regents’ intentions behind the move were virtuous. America’s education system is unacceptably unequal. But it would be a mistake to scapegoat standardized testing as the cause of those problems. Rather, the SAT and ACT reflect systemic discrimination perpetuated by our K-12 education system, under which a student’s zip code can determine the quality of education they receive.

Ditching a metric that reflects the uncomfortable, unequal reality of college preparedness doesn’t address the root cause of inequality, nor does it fix the outcome. Giving students an even playing field at the K-12 level so they perform better on these tests is crucial to eradicating inequity in the admissions process.

The Regents’ intentions were in the right place when they eliminated test-conscious admissions six years ago. Their experiment, though, has failed unequivocally.

Come June 2027, the Regents have a chance to get it right. We urge them to take it.