Cancel the SAT to restore the SAT, the United States experienced what?

In Math 2 at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), a group of freshmen with Senior high school A's and other transcripts are relearning "addition, subtraction, multiplication and division of fractions" in a college tutorial class, many of whom are at a loss when faced with a one-dimensional equation. According to the school’s report, among the incoming freshmen in 2025, one in eight has not reached the Senior high school graduation level in mathematics, and one in twelve has not met the junior high school standard. The number of students requiring such tutoring surged from 32 in 2020 to 921, with their proportion climbing from 0.5% to 11.8%. 

The number of underperforming students admitted has surged, primarily because the University of California (UC) system has eliminated standardized test score requirements for admissions, while high school grades tend to vary widely across institutions.

In early 2020, reform advocates strongly argued that standardized testing perpetuates social stratification and that abolishing it is essential to safeguard educational equity. In response, UC’s Academic Senate issued a comprehensive report asserting that the SAT and ACT are strong predictors of college academic performance and do not disadvantage underrepresented groups within UC’s holistic review framework. In May of the same year, the UC Board of Regents, defying the Academic Senate’s expert recommendations, unanimously voted 23–0 to phase out the SAT/ACT and subsequently pledged not to consider standardized test scores at all by spring 2025.

As the largest public university system in the United States, UC’s decision has set a powerful example. Coupled with the fact that the new crown epidemic at the time led to the cancellation of a large number of exams, it was"OptionalThe (Test-Optional) policy provides a realistic boost. Starting in June 2020, prestigious Ivy League schools such as Harvard and Yale followed suit. By 2022, more than 60% of U.S. undergraduate programs no longer required applicants to submit standardized test scores.

A turning point came in 2022, when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology took the lead in reinstating standardized test requirements, citing the critical importance of standardized math scores in predicting performance in STEM fields. In 2023, empirical research by scholars at Harvard and other institutions demonstrated that standardized test scores are a better predictor of academic success in college than high school grades, and they are particularly effective in identifying high-potential students from disadvantaged backgrounds. In 2024, Ivy League schools such as Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth have successively reinstated their policies requiring the mandatory submission of standardized test scores. By 2025, six of the eight Ivy League schools have reinstated this requirement.

Educational assessment should, by its very nature, adhere to the intrinsic logic of knowledge and competence and be embedded in the practices of professional communities. When evaluation becomes hostage to political agendas—racial equality, satisfaction management, and anti‑elitist sentiment—grades cease to serve as an objective measure of learning outcomes and instead transform into a moral resource: one used to allay anxieties, compensate the disadvantaged, and signal inclusiveness.

Compared with cold, impersonal exam scores, warm, sentiment-laden egalitarian rhetoric has come to wield overwhelming dominance throughout the entire education system. As a result, the evaluation signals become distorted: standards are rendered hollow, outcomes are no longer comparable, and the feedback function is lost. Cancelling the exam may appear to remove an “obstacle,” but in reality it undermines the institutional pathway through which students can secure educational resources based solely on their own abilities.

A survey by the Fordham Institute shows that GPA inflation in affluent high schools has been far more rapid than in less affluent schools. This means that, even from an egalitarian perspective, the softening of grading standards has failed to yield the anticipated improvements and has instead deprived disadvantaged groups—those most in need of standardized safeguards—of opportunities for objective evaluation and fair selection.

Not surprisingly, the authority to assign grades at American universities has also been undermined. For a long time, amid a public discourse that emphasizes “reducing anxiety” and “safeguarding self‑confidence,” the grading practices of top‑university professors have shifted from scholarly judgment to emotional appeasement and conflict avoidance. At present, more than 60% of Harvard undergraduate grades are A’s, and 79% of Yale undergraduates receive an A or A−; the GPA threshold for highest honors has already approached 3.99. When A becomes the default grade, grades degenerate from an academic metric into a placebo. Recognizing this issue, Harvard University recently passed a resolution with the approval of 70% of its faculty: starting in 2027, the proportion of A grades in each course will be strictly capped at 20%. From the admissions stage to the educational development phase, U.S. higher education has begun to reaffirm the value of standardized testing.

The educational excellence of a developed country is not automatically sustained by the high standards it once achieved; rather, it may succumb to complacency in times of prosperity, neglect quality while maintaining its lead, and pander to populism in the pursuit of political expediency.

A misguided approach to evaluation reform will lead to a decline in both fairness and efficiency. When political pressures compel test scores to cede their evaluative authority, admissions descend into a haze of diversity, and educational assessment devolves into a collective delusion. When examinations are easily abolished, education loses its concrete feedback mechanism: students no longer know where they truly stand, and the system, in turn, is deprived of its ability to identify talent and allocate resources.

Restoring the authority to evaluate examination scores is by no means a return to “score‑centrism”; rather, it is a refusal to allow public sentiment to supplant sound educational judgment. Only honest evaluation can free education from the influence of vested interests and, within a genuine framework of competence, help each individual find a path worth pursuing.