I’ve spent close to twenty years preparing students for the SAT, so you might expect my position on its potential return to the University of California to be simple.
It isn’t.
I think the test measures something real. But I also think most of what is sold as test prep is a waste of time and money.
In her New York Times essay, “This California Educational Juggernaut Doesn’t Need the SAT,” Miriam Pawel argues against reinstating the test. She is right that the SAT will not repair California’s unequal K-12 system.
Two months earlier, the Times editorial board made the opposite case. More than 3,000 UC faculty have now signed two open letters calling for admissions testing to return. They are right that eliminating a measure of readiness does not eliminate the need for readiness.
Both things can be true.
The UC San Diego data show why that distinction matters. The share of first-year students placed below college-level precalculus rose from under 1 percent before 2021 to 11.8 percent in 2025.
There are several reasons for that increase. The test did not create those gaps. Removing it did not make them disappear. It left them to be discovered after students arrived.
Test-optional admissions can create a different problem, too.
When Dartmouth studied its test-optional years, it found that less-advantaged applicants were withholding scores that could have helped them.
Students saw that a 1400 fell below Dartmouth’s published range and assumed they should hide it.
But Dartmouth reads scores in context. A 1400 from a student whose high school averages 1000 can be a powerful signal of what that student accomplished with the opportunities available.
Hiding the measurement didn’t protect those students.
It hid them.
The deepest problem is not whether we keep the test. It is what we do about the gap the test reveals.
This is where conventional test prep earns its bad reputation.
The standard playbook is familiar: drill the tricks, game the sections, spike the number, forget it all by June.
That version deserves the criticism.
The score is feedback. Readiness is the product.
The SAT is imperfect, but it samples real capacities: reading closely, reasoning under constraints, and managing complexity on a clock.
Prepare a student by building those capacities, and the score moves because the readiness moved. The benefits continue long after the test is forgotten.
Prepare a student with shortcuts, and the score may move while the student does not.
Bring back the SAT, replace it with a better measure, or leave it out. No admissions policy can close a readiness gap after it has formed.
The important question is not only how we identify readiness.
It is how we build it.
Great learners are built, not born.