UC's SAT Ban Created a Math Illiteracy Crisis — Now Students and Professors Are Fighting Back

AB 1217 would have forced UC and CSU to take admissions orders from K-12 bureaucrats — the same system producing students who can’t do middle school math. Professor Jelani Nelson drove to Sacramento multiple times, recruited allies from government and industry, and released a video on SaveMath.net exposing the bill. The sustained pressure worked: the bill died. Legislators now know organized opposition is watching every vote.

Mississippi is the only state to improve reading scores for its bottom 10% of students over the last decade — every other state declined. Meanwhile, California’s grade inflation leaves 72% of Black 4th graders unable to read at basic level. Film professors at top universities can’t get film students to finish watching movies, then curve the grades anyway. The system isn’t failing — it’s lying about failure.

Neither party is offering a real fix. Democrats cut gifted programs and eliminated selective admissions in the name of equity — even when learning outcomes collapsed. Republicans scored points opposing progressive overreach but proposed nothing to replace it. The Center for Educational Progress laid out what both sides ignore: meet students where they are, use the science of learning, and measure what actually matters.

UC Berkeley EECS Chair Jelani Nelson surfaced archival footage from the May 2020 Regents meeting showing board members openly objecting to dropping the SAT — citing faculty data proving the test wasn’t an impediment to underrepresented students. Regent Lansing said it plainly: ‘All of the data I have listened to from the faculty says that the test is not an impediment.’ They voted unanimously to drop it anyway under pressure from Janet Napolitano.

1 in 12 UCSD freshmen can’t do middle school math, and 25% of students in the new remedial-remedial course had perfect 4.0 GPAs in high school. UCSD’s own Mathematics Department has known for decades that the SAT is the single best predictor for math placement — but UC’s test-blind policy won’t even look at scores. The correlation between high school math grades and actual math ability is just 0.25.