ABOUT TIME, TOO.

Joanne Jacobs offers a plea from California's (checks notes) college professors.  "Don't make us reteach middle-school math, say STEM profs at 'test-free' UC."

Apparently the college boards, let alone mathematics placement tests, were exclusionary, or something.

Dropping standardized test scores for admissions was supposed to expand equity, writes Gabrielle Temaat on College Fix. The University of California system stopped requiring standardized test scores for admission in 2020, and many other universities did the same.

However, highly selective universities such as Yale, Brown, Dartmouth and Penn have reinstated the SAT requirement, "after studies found standardized test scores to be the best predictor of students’ future academic performance." Princeton will reinstate the requirement starting with the 2027–28 admissions cycle, she writes.

That might help with faculty morale, although the government schools are perpetuating a different sort of fraud on the admissions offices.  “A lot of students have taken precalculus or calculus in high school, and they've basically been lied to by their school systems. They don't actually know these subjects at all."  That could be from that open letter signed by multiple California system professors calling attention to the Distressed Material matriculating despite not being able to do middle school arithmetic, or perhaps from an internal Berkeley report noting the same things.

California might not yet be where Wisconsin is, with legislation requiring the state's universities to identify the sources of Distressed Material.  First you have to recognize you have a problem, then you have to work the problem.  Thus far, nobody has implemented the next step, which is to send the school districts that didn't do it right the first time the bill for staffing those remedial, er, developmental, classes.