To test or not to test? A growing number of elite schools are choosing to abandon test-optional admissions policies in favor of mandates that applicants submit their SAT and ACT scores, pushing back on equity concerns over standardized testing.

Yale will once again require standardized test scores for admissions, becoming the second Ivy League university to reverse test-optional policies that were embraced during the Covid pandemic. Earlier in February, Dartmouth announced the same mandate will return with the class of 2029. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology led the charge back in March of 2022 when it determined that standardized testing was crucial to successful admissions.

Critics have long viewed the SATs and ACTs, the two most widely used tests in admissions, as biased and exclusionary tools. Some said that they arose out of the eugenics movement. Yet new evidence shows that standardized testing helps even the playing field for low-income applicants. Yale and Dartmouth cite recent research disclosing that ACT and SAT scores, submitted alongside grades, “are the most reliable indicators for success” at the university. 

“The general feeling is that while there are many ways to increase your advantage in the college admissions process, test scores remain one element least susceptible to manipulation,” the co-founder of the New York City-based educational consulting firm, Entryway, Jennifer Bloom, tells the Sun. “Without test scores, admissions officers report feeling like they are guessing at which students will be successful in college. Enough students are struggling that admissions officers have decided to reinstate these tests.”

Rising grade inflation at schools across the country renders grades a less reliable metric on their own. Ms. Bloom says that two-thirds of students at the top New York City private schools are earning A-s or better. 

So, on standardized tests, students from low socioeconomic backgrounds have a chance to show their capabilities. A 2016 study found that requiring the tests increased the number of poor and non-white children in gifted programs. MIT’s dean of admissions and student financial services, Stuart Schmill, said in 2022 that testing is “the shortest path for many students to demonstrate sufficient preparation — particularly for students with less access to educational capital.”

When colleges got rid of the requirements in 2020, admissions generally became more competitive. “Test optional policies created a bubble at the top for those submitting scores,” the chief executive of a New York City-based tutoring program for standardized tests, Tutor Associates, Sasha DeWind, tells the Sun. “In other words, students began to send scores only if they were superb (relative to a specific school’s standards), inflating the scores of admitted students.”

Though the number of applicants at these schools skyrocketed, “most admissions officers felt that the actual number of qualified and competitive applicants didn’t rise,” says Ms. Bloom. “Lots of kids can apply to Harvard. This doesn’t mean that the number of truly competitive kids went up.” 

Despite promises by universities that test-optional policies would broaden the pool of admitted students, not much has changed in the pool of admitted applicants at the top schools. At Yale, for example, nearly 90 percent of attending students had submitted test scores, according to a data set released by the university for the 2022-2023 academic year. 

Some schools may hesitate to follow the likes of Yale and Dartmouth in reinstituting test mandates. Doing so could decrease their number of applicants, increasing admissions rates, and lowering schools’ rankings in the US News & World Report. Yet Ms. DeWind thinks the latest developments portend “a return to standardized testing in college admissions, at least among the most competitive colleges.”