Do Colleges Have to Go Back to the SAT?

Around the country, colleges and universities are gearing up for another admissions cycle. During the 2023–24 academic year, institutions like Dartmouth College and Harvard and Brown Universities announced a return to required standardized testing for applicants. It may feel inevitable that the majority of colleges will follow in their footsteps, but that is not a foregone conclusion. More than 2,000 institutions remain test optional or test free today, reflecting the unprecedented change that occurred in the admissions world during the pandemic.

While some universities have made test-optional admissions permanent (e.g., the University of Michigan, Columbia University), others are still weighing the pros and cons of requiring tests. In order to inform decision-making, an important question is to ask what happened during the pandemic when the vast majority of selective colleges went test optional.

Our research team studied 186 selective and highly selective institutions that went test optional during the pandemic. In preliminary evidence, we found that test-optional policies adopted during the pandemic were linked with increases in Black student enrollment at moderately selective institutions, and some evidence that they were linked with increases in low-income student enrollment at highly selective institutions. The demographic shifts were not radical (e.g., an estimated 13 to 19 percent increase in Black student enrollment), but even incremental change can make a difference for students’ lives.

One caveat is that our team’s research is based on the 2020–21 admissions cycle, when most institutions could still use race-conscious admissions. Now we’re in a very different place, given the 2023 Supreme Court ruling that greatly restricted race-conscious admissions. However, we can look to colleges in states that already had bans on race-conscious admissions to get an idea of how shifting testing policy might affect things in an environment where colleges can’t consider race.

The University of California system has not been able to consider race since 1996. It adopted test-free admissions in 2021 and recently admitted its most diverse class to date. While the UC Board of Admissions did not initially endorse the UC system’s decision to go test free, they wrote more recently that “elimination of standardized tests [has] demonstrated a way in which UC can lead in advancing access and opportunity for the state’s students.” In our paper, we found some evidence that test-free policies, relative to test-requiring policies, were associated with increased enrollment among Pell Grant recipient, Black and Latinx students, although the results were not consistent across models.

In Michigan, where the University of Michigan has not been able to consider race since 2006, there has been a slight increase in Black student enrollment in recent cohorts. Whether it’s because of test-optional policies or not is hard to ascertain, but Michigan seems pleased enough to formally stick with test optional.

On the other hand, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology just announced a stark drop in underrepresented racially minoritized enrollment in its first admissions cycle after the Supreme Court ruling. Dean of admissions Stu Schmill was quick to say that it has nothing to do with MIT’s return to required testing in 2022. After all, MIT admitted its most diverse class to date with test-required policies last year. However, he overlooked the point that requiring tests while being able to use race-conscious admissions is a very different scenario than requiring tests but not being able to use race-conscious admissions.

Some have argued that requiring test scores can expand access by helping institutions identify talented students who might otherwise go overlooked in the pool. While this may be the case for some individual students, for years preceding the pandemic, standardized tests were known more for gatekeeping than fostering inclusion in admissions. University of Michigan professor Michael N. Bastedo and colleagues found that while low-income students are more likely to be admitted when their test scores are read in context (i.e., compared to the average at their high school), the same goes for more affluent students. They write, “Our findings also indicate that providing additional context about students’ SAT scores leads to more positive evaluations, regardless of socioeconomic background, suggesting that such information may not serve to ‘level the playing field’ between higher- and lower-SES students in the admissions process.”

There will always be disproportionately more wealthy students in the applicant pool, so requiring test scores will likely work more often to the benefit of affluent students than low-income students. And while some are concerned that institutions need test scores to know how well students will do in college, research by Bastedo and his colleagues also suggests that contextualized GPA (a student’s GPA in relation to their peers’) is a stronger predictor of college success outcomes at a wide array of institutions, including more selective ones.

We are about one year out from the Supreme Court’s ruling restricting race-conscious admissions. While test-optional and test-free policies are no panacea to the entrenched inequities that surround higher education admissions, they remain a tool that may be able to expand access in a modest fashion. Rather than just looking to what the most stringently selective colleges are doing, institutions should examine their data closely and work to ensure their admissions processes are aligned with their missions and goals related to equity and access.