College Entrance Exams The University of California System Cannot Consider SAT or ACT Scores Through at Least Spring 2025 Written by Sara Calvert-Kubromon May 18th, 2021 My passion for higher education and working with students began as a resident assistant, admissions overnight host, and study abroad enthusiast as an undergraduate student at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. Working with high school and college students has been at the core of my professional experiences ever since. My first few years out of college included serving as an AmeriCorps member, working in public health, and teaching yoga. I later worked for the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Boston College and subsequently served as a lead administrator of a freshman study abroad program at Northeastern University in collaboration with their admissions team. While at Northeastern, I worked with faculty, deans, students, and parents in a wide-array of academic disciplines in several countries. It was exciting to provide robust academic and cultural experiences for students all over the world as they started college before returning to Boston to pursue the rest of their degree. I most recently served as an admissions officer at my alma mater, where I recruited students of diverse academic interests primarily from the East coast, California, and Arizona, and worked with applicants from all over the United States and the world. While at Lewis & Clark I worked with deposited students taking a gap year, coordinated the college’s release of admissions decisions, served as an athletics liaison working with athletic coaches and recruits, helped oversee visit and student-interviewer programs, and managed and trained new admissions counselors. Learn More About Sara act, sat, standardized testing, standardized tests, by Sara Calvert-Kubrom, former admissions officer at Lewis & Clark College After over a year of evolving changes and news out of California, a legal settlement concluded on Friday, May 14, that the University of California system cannot consider SAT or ACT scores for students applying through spring of 2025. This settlement concludes the 2019 lawsuit filed against the UCs due to concerns about the disproportionate disadvantage of standardized testing for students with disabilities and many low-income, Black, and Latinx students. What does this mean? The SAT and ACT will not be used in the admission or merit scholarship review process for applicants to any UC campus. The UC admission website does note, though, that students who choose to submit test scores as part of their application can later use those scores “as an alternative method of fulfilling minimum requirements for eligibility or for course placement” after they enroll. But those scores will not be considered by the application readers making admission decisions. With the absence of test scores, the UCs will continue their holistic application review process and, like other test optional/test free colleges, they will closely evaluate academic readiness through evaluation of classes, grades, rigor, and academic trends during a student’s high school career. As mentioned in our past articles about UC testing policies, we don’t yet know what will happen after spring of 2025, but we will continue to monitor testing policies closely in the coming years. Related Resources Read | Posted on October 23rd, 2023 Should I Submit SAT or ACT Scores to Test Optional Schools? Read | Posted on June 15th, 2023 Standardized Testing Policies in 2023 Read | Posted on January 17th, 2023 Does Your PSAT Score Matter?