UC targets high school course requirements amid SAT debate. What aspiring students need to know 15%
By Jaweed Kaleem33%
7/23/2026, 10:00:00 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 19 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Post Hoc (False Cause), and Pessimism Bias, with Framing Effect as the most egregious example at 13.4% saturation with 180 hits. Analysis detected 1,049 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,344 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 31.3% and a BS Rank of 15% (18,024 of 21,175 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 85.10% of the article peer group.
As UC embarks on a new and speedier plan to determine whether to reinstate SAT standardized testing, the university's admissions board is also moving to reexamine key academic requirements that reach even further into California high school classrooms: the exact set of courses students must take to get in.
Those requirements dictate what California teenagers learn long before they even fill out an application.
Because of the size and influence of UC across the state, the UC course requirements determine aspiring students' high school careers.
On Wednesday, the UC Academic Council, the executive body of the systemwide faculty Academic Senate, ordered the university's admissions board to review both questions.
The board will study standardized testing first, delivering a report to the council by Feb. 12, 2027, the council announced.
The Board of Regents would receive a recommendation on whether to require the SAT or ACT no later than June 2027.
The admissions board will then turn to high school course requirements, submitting an initial report to the council in May 2027; the regents would take up any course changes at an unspecified later date.
UC Academic Senate Chair Ahmet Palazoglu is framing the course review as an open question about "how UC defines and evaluates college readiness in a rapidly changing educational environment," rather than a move to add or cut requirements.
The schedule is faster than it appeared just days ago.
Last month, the admissions board rolled out a road map to study both testing and the course requirements, then abruptly withdrew it July 10 without explanation, leaving one of the university's most closely watched debates in limbo.
Board of Regents Chair Maria Anguiano has since said the admissions debate had focused "too narrowly" on testing and called for "a fresh look at how we define and evaluate college readiness."
UC leaders said the new plan does not change the scope of the earlier road map but accelerates it, moving the testing decision timeline up by about four months.
For now, UC officials said, nothing changes for applicants.
Students applying by Dec. 1, 2026, for fall 2027 admission will not have to submit SAT or ACT scores, and the university has not decided whether requirements will change for fall 2028 or later.
Any change would require a vote by the regents, who have final say over both the tests and the courses.
The course portion of the review targets what UC calls its "A-G" requirements: 15 yearlong high school courses across seven subject areas (thus A-G), that students must pass to be eligible for admission to UC or California State University.
UC said the review will weigh "the current number and subject areas that are required and recommended."
The admissions group that will lead it, the Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools, will consult with representatives of the state Board of Education and K-12 subject specialists.
Palazoglu, of the UC Academic Senate, said in a statement that faculty leaders "will continue working collaboratively with subject matter experts, K-12 partners, and other stakeholders to carefully examine how UC can best promote academic preparedness, student success and educational opportunity for California's students."
The concerns are not new.
Under the now-scrapped June road map, a separate faculty work group was to examine whether the 15 courses needed to change.
In announcing that effort, UC's admissions board said the requirements "may be overly prescriptive/rigid" and might not "effectively address changing workforce needs, widespread adoption of AI, UC faculty concerns about preparation, ongoing shifts in student learning styles, and students' need to apply knowledge and skills to current real-world scenarios."
Those questions carry over to the review announced Wednesday.
The requirements span seven areas: two years of history, four years of English, three years of math, two years of science, two years of a language other than English, one year of visual and performing arts, and a single "college-preparatory" elective.
They run deeper than what California requires to graduate high school.
UC also "strongly" recommends a fourth year of math and recommends a third year of science.
Math in particular has been a flash point at UC, where professors who have complained about declining student math skills say screening applicants with SAT scores could help bring in better-prepared first-year students.
Because UC and CSU share the course requirements, they effectively define the high school course track for college-bound Californians.
A UC Office of the President report prepared for the regents found that 98% of California's more than 2 million public school students have access to the full UC-required curriculum.
The report said that the share of graduates completing it has risen from 45% in 2015-16 to 54% in 2024-25.
Fewer than 1% of UC applicants and admitted students take only the minimum 15 courses.
Most take between 20 and 30, according to UC's admissions officials.
This is not the first time the course requirements — or math specifically — have become a tension point.
In 2013, UC approved a data science course, submitted by Los Angeles Unified, to broaden math options, and by 2020 allowed such courses to substitute for advanced algebra.
In 2023 and 2024, UC's faculty admissions board reversed that ruling, finding that three of the most popular data science classes were too light on algebra to count.
Speaking to regents last week at UC San Francisco, California State Board of Education President Linda Darling-Hammond described a "crowded curriculum" pulled in many directions.
They included legislative educational additions such as ethnic studies and financial literacy, a statewide push into college and career pathways, and the expansion of dual enrollment with community colleges.
Darling-Hammond described a system straining to keep pace with a changing economy, in which students increasingly move in and out of college and blend academic coursework with hands-on career training.
She endorsed the review as a necessary evolution of "a very important system that we benefit from here in California in a unique way," while flagging what makes UC an outlier nationally.
"There is no other state that both has admission requirements that are laid out and then actually approves each and every course and its content," Darling-Hammond said.
In addition to testing requirements — eliminated six years ago amid concerns about racial equity and access to testing during the pandemic — course policies have also evolved over the years.
The requirements were built into UC's rules in the 1930s, reached 15 courses by the early 1960s and added visual and performing arts as a category in 1999, the UC report said.
Since the 2010s, UC has also updated its course criteria to match statewide academic standards, such as Common Core math standards and Next Generation Science Standards.
In addition to the data science dispute, a separate effort would have made a semester of ethnic studies a new admissions requirement, but the UC Faculty Assembly, part of the systemwide Academic Senate, voted it down in April 2025.
During a regents meeting last week, faculty and students spoke passionately about UC admissions, including the course requirements.
Some math faculty members have warned against loosening the requirements.
Svetlana Jitomirskaya, a mathematics professor at UC Berkeley, said in an interview that she and others fear the effort to reevaluate the course list is "a dangerous Trojan horse" and warned that Algebra II should not end up on the "chopping block," replaced by what she called watered-down data science courses.
Others support keeping courses as they are for different reasons.
Eric Rath, founder and president of Los Angeles-based Rath Tutoring, a college prep service, said in an interview that the university should preserve the existing baseline, which he described as a threshold system.
"Students clear the bar or they don't," he said.
Teesha Sreeram, the student observer to the Academic and Student Affairs Committee, urged the university to keep its focus on access.
"Expanding access to rigorous coursework is one of the most impactful investments we can make in California students," Sreeram said, reminding regents that "college readiness doesn't stop at admission."
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