A University of California, Los Angeles, professor told Fox News Digital on Thursday that the university systems “test-blind” admissions policy failed to eliminate racial disparities in standardized testing as intended.
“That was obviously the motive. The UC Regents were very clear,” said Gabriel Rossman, a sociology professor at UCLA. “They did get rid of the SAT because they thought it had a disparate impact by race.”
More than 3,000 faculty members across the University of California system have backed open letters urging the system to reinstate the SAT and ACT in undergraduate admissions. Former UC President Janet Napolitano led the effort in 2020 to phase out the standardized tests, citing equity concerns.
In response to growing faculty feedback, the University of Californias Academic Council directed the Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools (BOARS) on July 22 to oversee a faculty-led, evidence-based review of standardized testing in undergraduate admissions.
Rossmans comments came after he co-authored an open letter with non-STEM colleagues, following a similar effort led by math and science faculty demanding that state officials restore the exams.
“We are University of California faculty from the social sciences, humanities, arts, business, law, education, and other non-STEM fields,” the non-STEM letter reads. “We are writing to endorse our STEM colleagues earlier open letter regarding the math component of SAT/ACT and argue for also using the verbal reasoning component of SAT/ACT in undergraduate admissions.”
The non-STEM faculty noted that while they supported the STEM letter’s conclusions, they did not initially sign it because it was specifically framed around math preparation.
Rossman told Fox News Digital that the test-blind policy has proven counterproductive to its original mission.
“One of the ironies of this is they got rid of the SAT in order to promote equity in enrollment,” Rossman said. “The UC freshman class had been diversifying for the previous 20 years, and then it leveled off in 2020. In particular, the big change was the ratio of Latino students versus Anglo students. The numbers of Black and Asian students didn’t change by nearly as much.”
An analysis by The Oakland Report, a regional media outlet covering Bay Area policy, similarly noted that eliminating test scores stripped admissions officers of a key metric for identifying high-achieving applicants from under-resourced schools.
“Removing test scores from the admissions process weakened UCs ability to evaluate academic readiness while ignoring the real causes of racial disparity,” the analysis argued.
The push from non-STEM faculty follows a recent op-ed in The San Francisco Standard by UC Berkeley mathematics professor Zvezdelina Stankova, who warned of a sharp decline in incoming student preparation under test-blind policies.
Neetu Arnold, a Paulson Policy Analyst at the Manhattan Institute, told Fox News Digital she is concerned abo
