Testing

The Most Common Score Is Zero: A Berkeley Professor's Damning Case Against UC's Test-Blind Policy

R
Rachel KimSenior Admissions Strategist, T20 Hub
August 17, 2026•11 min read

A UC Berkeley math professor just published the most detailed first-person account yet of what’s happening inside UC classrooms since the system dropped the SAT and ACT. The numbers are staggering. The stories are heartbreaking. And the policy debate is far from over.

Zvezdelina Stankova — a nationally decorated math teacher who stands in front of 500 to 1,400 students three days a week — wrote in The San Francisco Standard that the share of incoming Calculus I students who are actually ready for calculus has been nearly halved since UC went test-blind. More disturbing: the most common score on Berkeley’s diagnostic math exam is now zero.

This isn’t a think piece about testing philosophy. It’s a field report from inside the classroom, backed by data that UC has not publicly disputed.

Two Students Who Expose the System

Stankova opens with two real students — names changed, schools withheld — whose outcomes make the problem visceral.

Elias was admitted to a top UC engineering program. Math had always been his weakest subject. His family was thrilled but surprised. The data suggests he has roughly a coin-flip chance of failing his first calculus course.

Nadia earned A’s in Calculus II and other college-level STEM courses through concurrent enrollment at a UC campus. She was rejected from multiple UC schools — including the one where she’d already proven she could do the work.

Put them side by side and the admissions outcomes look less like evaluation and more like a coin flip.

The Diagnostic Data: Before and After

Berkeley has administered diagnostic exams to incoming Calculus I students for years. The before-and-after picture is stark.

Before test-blind admissions (2018–2020):

  • 71% of students tested as ready or nearly ready for calculus
  • Just 0.14% tested below basic algebra
  • The bottom of the distribution was essentially empty

After test-blind admissions (2021–2023):

  • Readiness fell to 51%, dropping to 44% by 2023
  • 17% of students scored zero on an eight-topic diagnostic
  • By 2022–23, more than one-third had severe math deficits
  • The single most common score was zero

To be clear: we’re not talking about students struggling with calculus. We’re talking about students who can’t do basic algebra — fractions, linear equations, the kind of math taught in seventh and eighth grade — sitting in a university calculus lecture.

“The bottom of the distribution exploded,” Stankova wrote. Before 2020, the weakest students were nearly nonexistent. Afterward, they became the largest single group in the room.

The Dougherty Valley vs. Mission High Problem

Stankova doesn’t just describe the crisis in the abstract. She points to specific school-level data that shows how the test-blind policy plays out in practice.

Dougherty Valley High School (San Ramon):

  • 432 of 756 juniors exceeded California’s math standard on the SBAC in 2024
  • Of 542 Berkeley applicants, 44 were admitted — an 8% acceptance rate
  • At least 174 students who exceeded the state math benchmark were rejected

Mission High School (San Francisco):

  • 193 of 202 juniors did not meet the state math standard
  • Of 76 applicants, 34 were admitted — a 45% acceptance rate
  • At least 25 students who failed the state benchmark were admitted

Without a standardized test score to flag math readiness, UC’s admissions process struggled to distinguish between a student who had already excelled in college-level math and one who might not survive the first midterm. Nadia would have been in the Dougherty Valley pool — rejected. Elias could have been in the Mission High pool — admitted.

This isn’t about which school is “better.” It’s about whether the admissions system can identify who’s prepared for the coursework. Right now, the data suggests it can’t.

Jennifer Doudna Steps In

The faculty pushback has gone far beyond the math department. In July, Jennifer Doudna — the Nobel Prize-winning Berkeley scientist who pioneered CRISPR gene editing — wrote directly to the UC Board of Regents.

Her letter was unusually blunt:

“The test-blind policy was a well-intentioned experiment, but the reality in our classrooms shows that it has failed. Admitting students who are unprepared sets them up for discouraging struggle. We cannot afford another cycle of administrative delay.”

Five Nobel laureates have now signed on to the faculty letters. More than two-thirds of UC’s mathematics faculty have added their names. In August, the San Dieguito Union High School District voted 4-0 to urge UC to reinstate standardized math testing for STEM admissions — the first school district to formally weigh in.

This isn’t a fringe position anymore. It’s a consensus among the people who actually teach UC students.

“Pandemic Learning Loss” Doesn’t Explain the Pattern

Defenders of the test-blind policy point to COVID-era learning loss and the rise of AI as the real culprits. Stankova acknowledges both — only 37% of California students performed at grade level in math in 2025.

But she makes a critical distinction: general learning loss would lower the entire distribution evenly. It wouldn’t hollow out the middle of the curve while piling students up at exactly zero. That pattern suggests something specific to the admissions pipeline, not a broad K-12 decline.

And here’s the timeline problem: students entering UC in fall 2027 were in fifth grade when the pandemic began. Seven years later, if many still can’t solve a basic inequality like x² > 4 — a multiple-choice question fewer than half got right — then pandemic learning loss isn’t doing all the explanatory work.

What else is going on? Stankova points to two compounding factors:

  • Grade inflation has made high school transcripts a weaker signal of actual ability
  • AI-generated essays have made personal statements a weaker indicator of student work

Without the SAT or ACT as a common benchmark, admissions officers have no standardized way to calibrate across California’s thousands of high schools — each with different grading standards, different course rigor, and different levels of grade inflation.

UC’s Failed Replacements

UC has tried twice to build an alternative to the SAT and ACT. Both efforts collapsed.

Attempt 1: A UC-specific admissions test. The 2020 task force estimated it would take nine years and cost $100–150 million to develop. It never got off the ground.

Attempt 2: The Smarter Balanced Assessment (SBAC). California’s statewide 11th-grade test was floated as a replacement. In 2021, UC’s Academic Senate concluded it was “not appropriate as an admissions test” and would cost about as much as the SAT while reproducing the same inequities critics wanted to solve.

Despite those conclusions, BOARS — the UC faculty admissions committee — spent much of spring 2026 revisiting the SBAC option before internal opposition forced the effort to be abandoned. The regents then imposed an accelerated review, which the Academic Senate now plans to conclude in June 2027.

That means no policy change can take effect before fall 2028. Every student applying between now and then will go through the same system that produced Elias’s and Nadia’s outcomes.

UC Is Now Completely Alone

While UC deliberates, the rest of elite higher education has moved decisively back toward testing:

School Policy (2026–27)
MIT Test-required
Stanford Test-required
Harvard Test-required
Yale Test-flexible
Brown Test-required
Dartmouth Test-required
Princeton Test-required (Fall 2028)
Caltech Test-required
UC System Test-blind (scores not considered)

Every Ivy League school, every peer institution — all have reinstated some form of standardized testing. UC is the only elite university system in the country that refuses to even look at test scores.

What This Means If You’re Applying to UC

If you’re a student or parent navigating UC admissions right now, here’s what to take away:

1. Your SAT/ACT scores won’t help you at UC. The system is fully test-blind, and that won’t change before fall 2028 at the earliest. Take the tests for other schools, but don’t expect UC to see them.

2. Math preparation is your best insurance. Whether or not UC brings back testing, the data is unambiguous: students who arrive underprepared in math struggle hard. If you’re planning a STEM major, invest in genuine math fluency — not just grades, but actual mastery. Take the hardest math courses available and make sure you understand the material, not just pass the class.

3. AP/IB math scores still matter for placement. Even though UC won’t see your SAT, strong AP Calculus or IB Math scores will determine where you start. A 5 on AP Calculus BC signals readiness in a way that a high school A no longer can.

4. Consider concurrent enrollment. If your high school offers it, taking actual college math courses (like Nadia did) is one of the strongest signals you can send — both to UC and to yourself about whether you’re ready.

5. Don’t assume the system is working for you. The data suggests UC’s current process sometimes admits underprepared students into rigorous programs while rejecting students who’ve already demonstrated college-level mastery. Protect yourself by building real skills, not just optimizing for what the application asks for.

The Uncomfortable Bottom Line

This debate isn’t really about the SAT. It’s about what happens when you remove the only standardized benchmark across thousands of high schools and don’t replace it with anything.

The test-blind policy was designed to open doors for students who couldn’t afford test prep. That goal is legitimate and important. But the result — according to the people who actually teach these students — is a system that sometimes lets in students who aren’t prepared and shuts out students who are.

Neither group is well served. Elias faces a coin-flip chance of failing calculus. Nadia is thriving at an out-of-state university, on track to graduate in three years — but she’s doing it outside the UC system that could have had her.

As Stankova wrote: “The question is no longer whether more evidence is needed. It’s how many more students we are willing to gamble with before acting.”

The Academic Senate’s review concludes in June 2027. The earliest any change takes effect is fall 2028. That’s two more years of applicants going through a system that thousands of faculty members say isn’t working.

The clock is ticking.

Sources

Tags:
#UC Berkeley#SAT#ACT#Testing Policy#University of California#STEM#Math#Admissions#Calculus
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