SAT and ACT May Never Regain Their Role in College Admissions

A growing list of schools are dropping the requirement for test scores, even beyond the current chaos.

Coronavirus has shattered the spring rituals of college admissions this year, with tours canceled and standardized testing dates scratched off the calendar. The campus tours will resume someday, and the SAT and the ACT will be administered again – but the stakes of those once-feared exams may be lower.

Almost 200 schools – including some of the most selective, such as Amherst and Williams colleges and Ivy League member Cornell University – have scrapped the requirement for standardized test scores at least for current high school juniors, acknowledging the chaos of lockdowns. Last week, the mammoth University of California system, one of the largest in the U.S. with almost 300,000 students, said it would suspend its testing requirement until at least 2024.

Still, it may be too soon to declare the demise of admissions testing, said Bob Schaeffer, interim executive director of FairTest, a nonprofit that has led the “test optional” movement for 30 years.

“My best-guess forecast for the near- to mid-term future is that the ACT and SAT will continue to be administered to substantial numbers of students,” Schaeffer said. “Some students will opt to take the ACT/SAT in the hope that a high score will improve their chances of admission.”

Even before the virus emerged, many schools were moving to permanently make tests optional. Long an outlier, Bowdoin College dropped the exams 51 years ago. Now more than 1,200 schools don't require it, including the University of Chicago and large public systems like Indiana University, the University of Oregon, Oregon State University and the University of New Hampshire, according to FairTest.

Colleges have reasoned that the tests often favor wealthier students whose families can pay for more tutoring. The College Board, which administers the SAT, and Iowa City-based ACT say that decades of research demonstrates the tests' value in admissions. The organizations argue that testing gives low-income students an opportunity to show their strength.

More than 2.2 million students from the class of 2019 took the SAT, according to the College Board, which is based in New York. About 1.8 million graduates in 2019 had taken the ACT.

Many students in the years ahead will probably take one of those exams before they have decided where to apply, said David Rion, college counselor at the private Loomis Chaffee School in Windsor, Connecticut. “I don't think they can get around it,” he said. That is, unless students know they will be attending a public school in their home state that drops it, he added.

Waiving the requirement is no small change. “It opens the door for a really big shift in how admission selection processes work,” said Whitney Soule, Bowdoin's dean of admissions and student aid.

The Maine liberal arts school considers an applicant’s high school environment and the courses available, whether a student chose the most challenging or easy courses, and how the person performed relative to their peers. About two-thirds of applicants include their scores.

Soule attended Bates College, which did not require standardized test scores, and she has coincidentally worked in college admissions for about 30 years at schools that don't require the SAT or ACT. Recently, she has fielded calls from about a dozen deans of admission who are considering joining that club.

Choosing a freshman class without seeing test scores will create more work for the admissions office, said Chuck Carney, a spokesman for Indiana University. The system of about 73,000 students eliminated the testing requirement for the next class of applicants for most of its campuses, including the flagship in Bloomington, this February after a decision process led by its faculty.

“It will better reflect the state of Indiana,” Carney said. “We do think it's worth the time to try to help get more students an opportunity.”

Admissions offices will have a challenge ahead. Many high schools switched to pass-fail grading for the final grading period of this school year, blurring a key chapter on students’ transcripts that would have helped colleges decide whom to accept. Colleges that dropped the test requirement will have even less information.

“It's an odd pivot,” said Nathan Kuncel, a professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota who specializes in the predictive validity of standardized tests and who has worked with colleges on admission practices. “It's going be a blind spot they'll have to deal with.”

That may be why California’s 10-campus system, which includes the prestigious Berkeley and Los Angeles campuses, is not entirely leaving the standardized-test game. UC President Janet Napolitano said the system she leads is developing its own alternative to the SAT to allow applicants “to demonstrate their preparedness.”