Blog · UC testing review · August 25, 2026
The data Newsom asked for already exists — school by school
One in twelve of UC San Diego's incoming class placed below middle-school math standards. One in eight placed below high-school standards — a group that grew nearly thirtyfold between 2020 and 2025, made up entirely of students who completed the required college-prep math courses with high grades. Those numbers are from UCSD's own Senate-Administration Workgroup report.
More than 3,000 UC faculty — five Nobel laureates and seven of the nine UC mathematics department chairs among them — signed open letters urging a return of admissions testing. Asked about it this week, Governor Newsom declined to take a side and said four words instead: "Show me the data."
That request is more answerable than six years of debate suggests. The argument has run on campus anecdotes and system-wide averages, but California publishes each school's math proficiency, and the University of California publishes each school's admissions outcomes. For 1,121 public and charter high schools, both halves of the governor's question are already public. They had simply never been joined.
We joined them. Preparation and admission rise together, strongly — the school-level correlation is 0.72. Schools where at least 70% of juniors meet the state math standard post a median UC Reach Score of 69. Schools under 40% post a median of 14. And yet: 20 of the UC's 100 biggest feeder schools post grade-11 math proficiency below 50%. A fifth of the system's largest pipelines graduate classes in which fewer than half of tested juniors met the state's own math standard.
Two honest limits, stated plainly. These are school-level datasets, not the same students tracked through both systems — nothing here says any individual admit was unprepared. And the state's grade-11 test is a different instrument from UC placement exams. We take no position on the testing policy itself.
The point is narrower: whatever the Academic Senate's review concludes, it should not have to run on anecdotes. The full brief — methodology, caveats, and the band table — is at Show me the data, and every California school's page on this site carries both of its numbers.