Karin Klein is the author of "Rethinking College: A Guide to Thriving Without a Degree" and the inaugural editor of L.A. Reported. She covered education for the Los Angeles Times as an editor and editorial writer.
When I’m driving the roller-coaster arc of a freeway flyover, I sometimes wonder how well trained the engineer was who designed it. This isn’t a matter of random neurosis. Over decades as an education reporter and editor, I’ve watched academic rigor decline as high schools tried to raise their graduation rates, followed by colleges that were under pressure to do the same. How long before the trend seeped into engineering schools, nursing schools and the like?
We’re not at that point and we might never be. But the rising tide of grade inflation – with teachers at high schools saying they are actively discouraged by administrators from flunking students or giving them a D grade – has brought us to the point of having to ponder the question of what matters more: The appearance of learning, or the actual accomplishment of it?
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Not that long ago, high school grades were a better predictor of college success – and admission – than the SAT. These days, if you go into parent groups on social media, you find hundreds of moms utterly confused that their child with a 4.0 grade-point average and numerous Advanced Placement courses didn’t get into selective schools. The reason is that straight-A students are a dime a dozen, and Advanced Placement tests have become easier to pass.
That’s why many top research universities have reinstated college placement exams – the SAT or ACT – as admission requirements. Studies show that the tests, not grades, are now the better indicator of college success. But the University of California has stuck by its ill-considered 2020 decision to eliminate test scores as a factor in admissions. It has a chance to rectify that now that the Board of Regents on Tuesday told the Academic Senate to review the policy and make recommendations by June 2027.
No one should be surprised at the number of UC faculty members who are in an uproar over students who arrive in their classrooms unprepared to do even basic college work. A 2025 report showed that one in eight freshmen at UC San Diego were incapable of high school math, and most of those couldn’t do middle-school math. Yet of those placed in remedial math, a quarter had received perfect grades in high school.
Paul Thornton
Since then, thousands of faculty members have called for UC to bring back entrance exams as one element of admissions decision-making. Not just math professors. Humanities professors have noticed big declines in the reasoning and writing skills of students since the SAT and ACT went away.
The regents ignored an exhaustive report by professors and other UC academic staff that called for keeping entrance exams in 2020; this time, it should listen to the people with boots in the classroom.
That’s not to say the SAT and ACT are perfectly objective or fair. Wealthier students can afford private tutors to prep for the tests, and they can pay the fees to take them multiple times for the best possible scores. They generally attend schools with smaller class sizes and more individual attention, and they have parents who have been able to provide more enrichment from Day 1.
Lower-income students, who are disproportionately Black and Latino, don’t get those benefits. Then again, standardized tests may give students who have problems achieving high grades in a conventional high school classroom an opportunity to show what they nonetheless know.
There’s talk about creating a fairer test or relying on the state’s Smarter Balanced assessments, given to all 11th graders. Both possibilities have benefits and downsides. A new test, one that is both valuable and fair, would take many years to create and vet for its usefulness. The Smarter Balanced tests don’t test all the skills needed for college work.
Mariel Garza
There’s an easier way: Instead of using entrance exams as a competition in which the student with a combined 1540 out of a perfect score of 1600 probably beats out the student with a 1450, UC could use the test as a floor for measuring academic readiness. In both math and language skills, it could set levels that indicate students have what it takes to succeed – no extra points for scores above that level. If the goal is to make sure that accepted applicants can handle the required courses, all they should have to meet is the number that qualifies them. (The floor might even differ for future engineers, who need more math skills, and for future lawyers, whose analytical and writing skills will matter more.)
Then other factors – grades, accomplishments and so forth – would be used for the more difficult and complicated task of deciding which students get to attend and which of the many very qualified do not get a seat.
Is it possible that UC's reconsideration of standardized entrance tests – with their slant toward better-off students – represents bending the knee to President Trump and his blatant dislike for creating a diverse college population? Maybe. Is it nonetheless the right thing to do, if a new policy works in ways that give all hard-working students a chance to shine? Absolutely.
