Beyond Transfer
Day two of the University of California Board of Regents meeting. I was standing outside the UCSF Mission Bay Conference Center, waiting for the Student and Academic Affairs Committee meeting to start, when a simple question to another attendee led to a conversation about who deserves to be a UC student. I mentioned the intensity of the earlier meeting and that I supported keeping SAT scores out of UC admissions. She asked why. I explained that a single test is an unfair barrier for underrepresented students and that UC’s own research shows it poorly captures students’ potential.
“Fair,” she replied, “but what about the honest, hardworking people who properly prepare their children?” In her view, families like that, and their high‑scoring children, are being punished when test scores are omitted. Students who “don’t measure up,” she insisted, shouldn’t be admitted to UCs because they drag down the university’s reputation. She even brought up the 2025 UC Davis shooting. She linked low scores not just to lower standards, but to dishonesty and even violence.
I left that conversation shaken, because without ever saying my name, she was telling me I didn’t belong. Her comments revealed a larger problem in the debate over whether to bring back SAT scores: Test scores are being treated as a moral sorting tool, not just a measure of academic skill. When people can move so easily from low scores to assumptions about dishonesty, laziness or danger, they are not neutrally defending rigor; they are deciding which communities are allowed to represent the UC brand and which are cast as a risk.
If UC reinstates SAT scores, it will not simply be choosing a measuring tool. It will be choosing whose achievements count and whose humanity can be quietly questioned inside its classrooms, especially for students from underrepresented racial, economic and carceral backgrounds.
As a Black, system-impacted, low-income student who transferred to UC Berkeley from community college, my life doesn’t fit the story she was telling about “unprepared” students. I am too embarrassed to share my SAT score publicly, but I will tell you this: My credit score is over 800. On paper, I am trusted to sign leases, manage substantial financial commitments and make complex financial decisions. Yet outside the UCSF Mission Bay Conference Center, I could feel myself being silently filed under “unprepared” simply because I do not have the kind of test score some people now want to bring back as the price of admission. Most noteworthy, my credit score was not determined in a day or by a single metric.
Just like my credit score, my path to Berkeley was not measured in a morning, but in years of disciplined work, academic excellence and persistence. Before I ever set foot on Berkeley’s campus, I earned degrees in English and literature at Southwestern College with a 4.0 GPA. I was accepted to multiple universities, awarded more than 20 scholarships and selected for competitive internships at Stanford and Princeton. At Berkeley, I maintained a 3.9 GPA and earned my degree in rhetoric. None of this success was predicted by my SAT score.
If that score had been treated as the truest measure of my ability, my path to Berkeley would have been blocked. When people argue that omitting test scores “penalizes” the honest, hardworking students who prepare, they erase students like me—students whose preparation shows up in years of coursework, research, work and resilience rather than a single Saturday morning exam. The danger is not that the UC admits unprepared students; it is that, by clinging to SAT scores, it refuses to recognize preparation and excellence that do not fit its preferred metric.
This summer, while reviewing over 90 applications for the next Miller Scholars cohort at Berkeley, I encountered students whose stories reminded me of my own. Many were excelling in demanding courses, including advanced calculus, while balancing work, family responsibilities and community commitments. Their applications reflected intellectual curiosity, discipline and persistence. Yet I could not help but wonder how many of these students would be reduced to a number if test scores again become a primary signal of merit. Reviewing those applications reinforced what my own journey taught me years ago: Excellence often reveals itself long before a university chooses to recognize it.
If UC is committed to true rigor and equity, it should strengthen the measures that actually capture preparation and potential. That means continued investment in community college pathways, transfer support programs and holistic review processes that credit sustained academic performance, research, work and service, not just performance on one exam. It also means listening to students who have already succeeded at the UC despite what their test scores predicted, and using our stories to refine what “UC material” really looks like.
That conversation at the Board of Regents stayed with me because it revealed what is at stake in the fight over test scores: not just admissions policy, but the quiet sorting of who is presumed worthy, trustworthy and safe. When a stranger can leap from low scores to dishonesty, laziness and even the threat of violence, it is not a neutral concern about standards; it is a story about which bodies and communities are presumed to tarnish the UC brand. If the UC reinstates SAT scores again, it will not just harden an old sorting mechanism; it will reinforce long-standing inequalities tied to race, class and involvement with the criminal legal system, pushing students like me back to the margins even when we have already proven our excellence.
I am proud that I engaged in that conversation, because Berkeley taught me to hear what is really being said. If this institution is serious about equity, it must refuse to confuse test scores with merit and instead build an admissions system that recognizes the many ways students prepare, persist and excel long before they ever walk into a UC classroom.
