Nearly 139,000 members of California's Class of 2026 sat for the SAT this year, a 12.6% jump from the previous class and the largest one-year gain in three years, even though the state's two massive public university systems still refuse to look at the scores. The surge comes as the University of California quietly reconsiders the test-free stance it adopted back in 2020, leaving high schoolers to prepare for a exam that might matter more soon, or might not matter at all where they actually want to go.
According to the Los Angeles Times, 138,763 California seniors took the SAT this cycle, based on College Board data released this week. Priscilla Rodriguez, the College Board's senior vice president of college readiness assessments, told the paper that reinstated testing requirements at other schools probably contributed to the increase, and that the College Board has made the exam more readily available while partnering with nonprofits on free test prep and live online tutoring. Rodriguez said UC's ongoing reevaluation likely did not drive this particular jump, since most of this year's graduates had already taken the test before that debate heated up, but she expects the UC discussion to push even more students toward the exam going forward.
Both UC and CSU eliminated their testing requirements in 2020 and have since permanently ended SAT and ACT admissions testing altogether, per the same report, though both systems still use scores for course placement once students enroll. Neither system currently factors SAT or other standardized test results into admissions decisions. That test-blind approach was locked in further by a May 2021 legal settlement, in which UC agreed under pressure from a student and advocacy group lawsuit not to evaluate SAT or ACT scores in undergraduate admissions through spring 2025, as reported by the Associated Press.
Elite Campuses Head the Other Direction
While California's public systems hold the line, some of the state's most competitive alternatives have gone the other way. Stanford announced in June 2024 that it would require SAT or ACT scores again for applicants entering in fall 2026, after internal committee reviews found the scores predicted academic performance on campus, according to The Stanford Daily. Caltech ended its own four-year testing moratorium in April 2024, and the University of Texas at Austin reinstated mandatory SAT and ACT submissions that same March for its fall 2025 applicants, per InGenius Prep.
California students sent SAT scores most often to USC, UCLA, UT Austin, Stanford, and UC Irvine, the Times reports, with USC receiving the most scores from California students and UCLA the second-most, even though USC itself remains test-optional. That pattern captures the strange split screen playing out for this year's seniors: chasing admission to test-free UC campuses at home while sending scores to out-of-state flagships and test-requiring competitors just in case.
Faculty Pressure Builds Inside UC
The backdrop to all this hedging is a system already arguing with itself. UC faculty have raised concerns that many incoming students lack basic math and reasoning skills, and more than 3,000 UC STEM and non-STEM faculty members signed open letters in May 2026 petitioning the university system to restore standardized testing, according to the Daily Bruin. That petition followed a 2025 UC San Diego academic report showing the number of incoming freshmen placing below high-school-level math had increased thirtyfold between 2020 and 2025, with more than 70% of those remedial students testing below middle-school math levels, a finding Hoodline covered in its UCSD math skills report.
UC Board of Regents Chair Maria Anguiano and Academic Senate Chair Ahmet Palazoglu announced in July 2026 that the Academic Senate will deliver a formal recommendation on whether to reinstate SAT and ACT admissions requirements by June 2027, per reporting cited by Lookout Santa Cruz. Any resulting policy change would not affect current applicants. The current friction echoes a January 2020 report from UC's own faculty-led Standardized Testing Task Force, which recommended keeping the SAT and ACT because scores predicted college success better than high school GPAs, according to the Berkeley High Jacket — a recommendation the Board of Regents overrode when it voted to drop testing requirements that May.
Free Testing Keeps Some Students in the Game
At Linda Marquez High School in Huntington Park, college counselor Jacqueline Villatoro told the Times that students there take the SAT largely because it is offered free during school hours, and that they retook it to improve their scores. Villatoro said students had stopped retaking the exam once colleges went test-optional, but private schools requiring the SAT again have helped push renewed interest even at schools where it isn't required for local public admissions.
Not everyone agrees standardized testing should make a comeback. Testing opponents have argued the exams do not uniformly predict academic success across divergent student backgrounds, and some universities eliminated testing requirements in the first place over equity concerns. Among California's 2026 SAT takers, Asian students posted the highest average scores, while the test-taking pool broke down as 40.6% Latino, 21.7% Asian, 21.4% white, and 4.2% Black students, according to College Board data reported by the Times.
Nationally, the reinstatements at Stanford, Caltech, and UT Austin remain the exception rather than the rule. Roughly 86.4% of nearly 2,200 verified four-year U.S. colleges remain test-optional and another 3.6% remain test-free, according to Forbes, with schools requiring scores making up only about 7% of institutions. That leaves California seniors navigating a landscape where the loudest debates are happening at the most selective margins, while the vast majority of college doors don't ask for a score at all.
