As a doctor, while working with patients, I never make a psychiatric diagnosis based on a hunch. I interview the patient and, based upon the clinical criteria, history and objective metrics, make a clinical diagnosis. If a physician ignores hard objective data to follow a popular trend, patients suffer. It is that simple.
Why should public education be any different?
Serving on the William S. Hart Union High School District board, I spend a lot of time looking at academic data and listening to students, parents and teachers across Santa Clarita. Our high schoolers work relentlessly, but California’s decision to eliminate the SAT from University of California admissions has pulled the rug out from under them. Dropping standardized testing wasn’t an act of equity — it was a misstep that traded objective merit for guesswork.
The argument for going “test-blind” was access. The actual result? A system governed by GPAs, personal essays, and bloated extracurricular lists.
Here is the problem: An “A” in an advanced placement calculus class at one high school does not mean the same thing as an “A” at another. When nearly everyone graduating with honors carries a 4.2 GPA, a transcript alone tells an admissions officer almost nothing about true subject mastery.
When you strip away an objective benchmark, you don’t help the hard-working kid who mastered algebra on their own. You are relying much more on essays, which can be very subjective.
That isn’t leveling the playing field. It’s just shifting the game to whoever has the slickest presentation. This results in some students joining great universities who lack basic math and language skills at the expense of other deserving candidates.
The Faculty Asked for the SAT. Sacramento Ignored Them.
This isn’t just my opinion. The empirical evidence is overwhelming, and it came straight from the UC’s own faculty.
Three thousand UC professors spoke up: A comprehensive task force commissioned by the UC Academic Senate examined years of student data. Their finding was unequivocal: Standardized test scores were the single most reliable predictor of whether a student would pass their first-year college courses and graduate on time — beating high school GPAs.
Harvard’s Opportunity Insights found the same: National data showed test scores are roughly four times more predictive of university success than high school grades alone.
MIT, Dartmouth, Yale, UT Austin, and others looked at their post-pandemic data, saw the gaps in student readiness, and promptly brought standardized testing back.
When 3,000 UC professors presented rigorous data proving the SAT works, state leadership chose ideology over empirical science. That is bad policy.
California’s public university system became world-class because it was built on rigor, hard work, and measurable excellence.
Real compassion does not mean lowering the bar or tossing out diagnostic tools. True equity means maintaining high standards, identifying real gaps early, and preparing our kids to compete in a demanding global economy.
It is time for California to listen to its own university faculty, follow the science, and bring the SAT back to the UC system.
Our students deserve nothing less.
Dr. Aakash Ahuja is an elected member of the William S. Hart Union High School District governing board. His column represents his views as an individual.
