For decades, the path to college ran through a familiar checkpoint: a Saturday morning spent filling in bubbles on a standardized test, your future distilled into a three-digit score. The SAT and ACT were the common currency of American higher education, the lingua franca that allowed admissions officers to compare a student from rural Mississippi with one from a Manhattan prep school. Then came a pandemic, and what followed was one of the most significant shifts in how American colleges decide who gets in.

More than 80 percent of U.S. four-year colleges and universities now do not require applicants to submit SAT or ACT scores, according to FairTest, the National Center for Fair and Open Testing. That represents over 1,800 institutions—and more than 1,700 have made these policies permanent. The change, accelerated by COVID-19's disruption of testing centers, has outlasted the pandemic itself, reshaping how millions of students present themselves to colleges and how colleges evaluate potential admits. But this is not a simple story of tests going away. It's a story about what we mean by "merit," who gets to define it, and whether a four-decade-old multiple-choice exam should still be the gatekeeper to opportunity.

The New Normal That Won't Go Away

When testing centers closed in March 2020, colleges faced an immediate practical problem: millions of students couldn't take the SAT or ACT even if they wanted to. Schools that had required scores for decades quickly pivoted to test-optional policies, framing them as temporary accommodations. But something happened during that forced experiment. Applications surged at many institutions. Applicant pools became, by some measures, more diverse. And the sky didn't fall—students admitted without test scores were graduating at roughly the same rates as those who submitted them.

Before the pandemic, about 1,075 accredited colleges were test-optional. By fall 2024, that number had nearly doubled to over 2,000. The growth wasn't evenly distributed—Vermont leads the nation with more than 73 percent of its colleges not requiring standardized tests, while Arizona sits at just 16.7 percent. But the trend was unmistakable. Major research universities, small liberal arts colleges, and state flagships all decided that perhaps the SAT and ACT weren't as essential as everyone had assumed.

The practical effect has been dramatic. Data from the Common Application shows that in the 2019-20 application season, 77 percent of applicants submitted test scores. By 2024-25, that figure had dropped below 50 percent, though it has recently started ticking back up. For the first time since 2021-22, the growth rate of students reporting scores has surpassed those choosing not to submit, suggesting the pendulum may be swinging again.

This shift has created a two-track system that can be confusing for students and families. At many schools, "test-optional" genuinely means optional—admissions officers evaluate applications holistically whether scores are present or not. At others, the label masks a more complicated reality. Several selective institutions have reported notably higher admission rates for students who submit scores compared to those who don't, leading to suspicions that optional isn't really optional if you want the best shot at getting in.

The Ivy League Reversal

Just as test-optional policies seemed to be calcifying into permanent practice, several of the nation's most selective universities broke ranks. In early 2024, Dartmouth became the first Ivy League school to reinstate testing requirements, followed quickly by Yale, Brown, and Harvard. MIT, Caltech, and Georgetown had already returned to mandatory testing. Stanford, Cornell, and Rice have announced plans to require scores for students applying for fall 2026.

These reversals came with a surprising rationale. Rather than arguing that tests help identify the smartest students, these institutions claimed that requiring scores would actually help them enroll more diverse classes. The argument rested on research that had been percolating through academic circles, particularly a study from Opportunity Insights, a Harvard-based research group led by economists Raj Chetty, John Friedman, and David Deming.

The study found that SAT and ACT scores are substantially more predictive of academic success at highly selective colleges than high school grades. Students with higher test scores consistently achieved higher college GPAs, and this relationship held regardless of family income or high school resources. More provocatively, the researchers found that students from less-advantaged backgrounds with comparable test scores to wealthier peers performed equally well in college—the tests weren't artificially inflated for privileged students, they argued, but rather reflected genuine differences in academic preparation.

Dartmouth's president, Sian Leah Beilock, explained the decision in a letter to the college community: "In a test-optional system, many applicants don't submit test scores. This disadvantages applicants from less-resourced families because Dartmouth admissions considers applicants' scores in relation to local norms of their high school." A student with a 1400 SAT from a high school where the average is 1000 provides "valuable information" about their potential, she argued—information that was being lost when students with modest-seeming scores chose not to submit them.

Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean Hopi Hoekstra echoed this reasoning: "When students have the option of not submitting their test scores, they may choose to withhold information that, when interpreted by the admissions committee in the context of the local norms of their school, could have potentially helped their application." The implication was clear: well-meaning students were hurting their own chances by staying silent.

David Deming, one of the Opportunity Insights researchers, put it more bluntly: "The virtue of standardized tests is their universality. Not everyone can hire an expensive college coach to help them craft a personal essay. But everyone has the chance to ace the SAT or the ACT."

The Diversity Question

These claims sparked immediate pushback. Critics pointed out that standardized test scores are famously correlated with family income. Research from Opportunity Insights itself found that children of the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans were 13 times more likely than children from low-income families to score 1300 or higher on the SAT. Calling the tests a democratizing force seemed, to many observers, to ignore their fundamental structure.

The empirical picture on whether test-optional policies actually increase diversity is genuinely mixed. A major study examining 99 private colleges that went test-optional between 2005-06 and 2015-16 found that the policy produced "modest but meaningful" gains in diversity—a roughly 1 percentage point increase in Black, Latino, and Native American student enrollment. More recent research focusing on the pandemic-era shift found that moderately selective colleges experienced statistically significant increases in Black student enrollment of 13 to 19 percent after dropping testing requirements.

But the gains at highly selective institutions have been less clear. "At highly selective colleges, findings suggest test-optional implementation related to an increase in applications but not consistent gains in enrollment," concluded researchers Kelly Rosinger, Dominique Baker, and Julie Park in a 2024 study. Some observers argue that test-optional policies merely reshuffled where diverse students applied without substantially changing who ultimately got spots at elite schools.

The debate has taken on new urgency since the Supreme Court's 2023 decision striking down race-conscious admissions. With affirmative action off the table, some advocates have pushed for test-optional policies as an alternative tool for promoting diversity. Others argue the opposite—that in a post-affirmative action world, standardized tests provide one of the few race-neutral ways for talented students from disadvantaged backgrounds to demonstrate their capabilities.

Texas Tech University offers an instructive example. According to Jason Hale, the university's assistant vice president of enrollment management, going test-optional has helped the school "mimic the demographics of our state." As a public institution, Texas Tech views reflecting its state's population as central to its mission. For schools with similar mandates, test-optional policies have proven useful, regardless of what happens at the Ivy League.

How Students Stand Out in a Test-Optional World

For the roughly 1.5 million students who apply to college through the Common Application each year, the question is practical: what does test-optional actually mean for my application? The honest answer is that it depends enormously on where you're applying.

At test-blind institutions—primarily the University of California system—standardized test scores aren't considered at all. Students can stop worrying about the SAT entirely. At genuinely test-optional schools, the admissions office claims to evaluate applications equally whether scores are present or absent. At test-flexible schools like Yale, students can submit SAT, ACT, AP, or IB scores to satisfy testing requirements. And at schools that have reinstated requirements, there's no ambiguity: you need to test.

The conventional wisdom among college counselors has shifted in interesting ways. Many now advise that if a student's scores fall at or above the 50th percentile of admitted students at a particular school, they should probably submit them. If scores fall significantly below that threshold, students might be better served by going test-optional at schools that allow it. This creates an asymmetric system where high scorers submit and lower scorers don't—which raises average reported scores and makes the published statistics increasingly unrepresentative of actual incoming classes.

For students who choose not to submit scores, other elements of the application bear more weight. Academic rigor and grades matter enormously—holistic admissions doesn't mean grades become unimportant. If anything, the transcript becomes more significant when test scores aren't providing a comparison point. Admissions officers pay attention to course selection: Did the student challenge themselves with AP or honors courses when available? Did they take four years of math and laboratory sciences?

Essays have become more consequential in the test-optional era. They provide one of the few windows into who a student is beyond their academic record, and admissions officers increasingly use them to assess qualities like resilience, curiosity, and self-reflection. The personal statement isn't the place to rehash activities or list achievements—it's meant to reveal something authentic about how the applicant thinks and what matters to them.

Letters of recommendation serve a complementary function. Strong letters from teachers who know a student well can illuminate qualities that don't show up elsewhere: intellectual engagement, growth over time, contribution to classroom discussions, ability to handle setbacks. Generic letters full of boilerplate language do little; specific anecdotes and genuine insight can move an application forward.

Extracurricular activities have always mattered, but their role has become more nuanced. Admissions officers increasingly emphasize depth over breadth—sustained commitment to one or two meaningful activities trumps a scattershot collection of clubs joined for resume purposes. Leadership roles, demonstrated impact, and authentic passion all register more than impressive-sounding titles. "Quality over quantity" has become something of a mantra among counselors advising students on how to present their activities.

The irony, as Harvard economist David Deming noted, is that many of these factors are themselves correlated with privilege. Wealthy families can afford essay coaching, counselors who know how to shape recommendation requests, and opportunities for impressive extracurriculars. The question of whether test-optional policies reduce or simply redistribute the advantages of affluence remains genuinely contested.

What Remains Unresolved

The test-optional movement has entered a paradoxical phase. The vast majority of American colleges have abandoned testing requirements, and that doesn't appear likely to change anytime soon. FairTest's executive director Harry Feder calls test-optional policies "the new normal" and argues that "de-emphasizing standardized exam scores is a model that all of U.S. education—from K-12 through graduate schools—should follow."

Yet among the most selective institutions, the trend is running in the opposite direction. If more elite schools follow Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth's lead, the practical effect could be a bifurcated system: test-optional for the majority of colleges, test-required for the most competitive ones. Students aiming for highly selective schools would need to prepare for standardized tests regardless of what policies prevail elsewhere.

The research debate is also far from settled. Supporters of testing cite studies showing that SAT scores predict college success better than grades, particularly at selective institutions where nearly everyone has a near-perfect GPA. Critics counter that longitudinal studies find the advantage of higher test scores largely disappears once you control for factors like motivation and family background. The correlation between test scores and income remains troubling to many, even if that correlation reflects broader educational inequities rather than flaws in the tests themselves.

What's clear is that the meaning of "merit" in college admissions is being actively contested in ways it hasn't been for generations. The standardized test was supposed to provide an objective measure that cut through the subjectivity of grades, recommendations, and essays. Whether it succeeded—and whether its alternatives are more or less equitable—is a question that American higher education is still trying to answer.

For students navigating this landscape, the practical advice is straightforward even if the policy debates are not: take the tests if you can do so without sacrificing your wellbeing, submit scores when they strengthen your application, and recognize that the holistic admissions process means every element of your application matters. The era of a single number defining your college prospects may be ending, but the work of demonstrating who you are and what you're capable of remains.

Sources

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