The overwhelming majority of colleges and universities in the United States are still not requiring students to submit SAT or ACT scores, continuing a trend that was accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to FairTest, an anti-standardized test advocacy group that tracks the number of colleges requiring test scores for admission, 1,075, or 47%, of the nation’s 2,278 bachelor’s degree-granting institutions had moved to a so-called test-optional admissions application prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, a number that has now ballooned to 1,839, or nearly 81% of all colleges and universities.
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Following the onset of the pandemic in March 2020, the College Board, which administers the SAT, canceled a number of testing dates. As a result, an additional 625 schools did not require fall 2020 applicants to submit test scores. However, most schools with competitive admissions were no longer accepting applications by the time the pandemic lockdowns hit in March 2020, FairTest told the Washington Examiner.
For the fall of 2021, 1,775 colleges moved to test-optional admissions, a number that jumped to 1,835 in 2022 and 1,839 for the fall of 2023, even as the pandemic began to recede and SAT testing schedules resumed as normal. Currently, FairTest says 1,460 institutions have moved permanently to test-optional admissions.
“The College Board and the SAT were founded to increase access to college and that remains our core mission,” the College Board told the Washington Examiner in a statement. “During the pandemic, colleges introduced more flexibility and choice into the admissions process. Some students may decide their application is stronger without test scores, while others will benefit from sending them. In fact, in the class of 2022, nearly 1.3 million U.S. students had SAT scores that affirmed or exceeded their high school GPA. That means that their SAT scores were a point of strength on their college applications.”
Jeremy Tate, the founder and CEO of the Classic Learning Test, an alternative college entrance exam, said in an interview with the Washington Examiner that while 80% of colleges are still operating on test-optional admissions, he expects a number of colleges to return to the old format of requiring standardized test scores.
“It has gone as far as it’s going to go,” Tate said of the move toward test-optional admissions. “Now, there is a very slow moving back, but it will never go back to what it was.”
Part of why Tate doesn’t expect to see a dash to return to standardized test evaluations is that the SAT and the ACT have been hit with accusations that the tests perpetuate systemic racism because certain racial minorities and students from lower income backgrounds tend to have lower test scores.
“There’s a war on merit,” Tate said. “Mainstream K-12 schools, instead of doing serious reading, writing, and arithmetic, have been doing a lot of political activism, and that’s being reflected in test scores. … And so what do you do? You blame the test as racist.”
FairTest describes its mission as “eliminating the racial, class, gender, and cultural barriers to equal opportunity posed by standardized tests, and preventing their damage to the quality of education.”
But the College Board says the SAT helps schools achieve their diversity goals.
“To consider every student fairly, colleges look at much more than grades,” the College Board said. “The SAT is widely available to millions of students to help them stand out on their application — and more students are taking it for free in their school during the school day. Evidence shows that when colleges consider SAT scores in the context of where students live and go to school … the SAT helps increase diversity.”
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Tate theorized that the movement away from standardized testing in higher education could also be a reaction to previous overemphasis on test scores.
“When I graduated high school in 2000, it was almost like your SAT score was branded on your forehead,” he said. “Now, we went to an opposite extreme of ‘The test doesn’t matter at all.’ The logical, sane position is, ‘OK, a test is a helpful snapshot into where a student is at in some key academic areas at a given moment in time.’ To make it anything more than that is not only unhelpful, but to just totally throw it out as well is not really helpful either.”
