Standardizing stress
SAT is returning to some colleges, and lack of cohesive nationwide policy is causing confusion, anxiety
ACalifornia mother drove 80 miles this month to find an SAT testing center with an open seat where her high school junior could take the exam. During college tours this spring, a teen recalled hearing some would-be applicants groan when admissions staffers announced they could not guarantee testoptional policies would continue.
And across the country, college counselors are fielding questions from teenagers alarmed, encouraged or simply confused by what seems like the return of the standardized test in admissions — maybe? Sort of ? In some places, but not in others?
“You could be expecting and preparing for a certain way to apply to a college and present yourself — but then they change it mid-application process,” said Kai Talbert, a 17-year-old high school junior in Pennsylvania. “That’s really confusing. It can set back a lot of people.”
Colleges nationwide have been updating their coronavirus-era policies on standardized testing, which many dropped when the pandemic shut down in-person testing centers. Some of the most selective schools are declaring they will require tests again — including, across the last two months, Dartmouth College, Yale and Brown. Others, such as the University of Chicago and Columbia, won’t. And still others have not yet picked a permanent policy: Princeton, Stanford, Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania have said they will remain test-optional for another year or two, while Harvard University plans to keep its testoptional policy at least through the 2025-26 application cycle.
Public universities have veered in different directions, too: The University of Tennessee system requires tests. The University of Michigan will be test-optional. The University of California system is test-blind, meaning schools refuse to consider SAT or ACT scores for admissions.
The patchwork of policies is wreaking havoc on applicants, parents and college admissions consultants nationwide, who are being forced to recalculate where and how they are willing to apply — or what to tell anxious teenagers about whether to test, retest or skip testing entirely — as decisions keep rolling out in real time.
Laurie Kopp Weingarten, founder of One-Stop College Counseling in New Jersey, said she now has a new response whenever a kid gives her a list of their school targets. She starts by going down the list, school by school, to review each institution’s testing rules and whether those seem likely to change.
Taking a breath, Weingarten rattled off a summary of the different testing requirements in place at every Ivy League school. It took her three minutes.
“Even just saying it, it sounds like insanity to me, and then we’re expecting kids to understand this?” Weingarten said. “Colleges should really analyze the data, come up with a decision and stop changing their mind.”
The shifting testing expectations are one of many changes roiling college admissions this year. Colleges are still grappling with the fallout from the landmark Supreme Court ruling that ended the use of race-based affirmative action in admissions. Many are undertaking an array of experiments in response to the decision in a bid to maintain diverse admitted classes — ending legacy preferences in some cases, adding essay prompts on adversity or identity in others, or increasing outreach in low-income areas.
And the disastrous rollout of a federal financial aid form that was supposed to simplify the notoriously difficult process has left students, parents and schools scrambling.
This is the most hectic and distressing admissions cycle in recent memory, said Jennifer Nuechterlein, a college and career counselor at a New Jersey high school. She laid special blame on schools that reinstated testing mandates in the past two months, some of which affect the high school juniors who will begin applying in the fall. This class of teens will have to take the SAT or ACT, should they decide to do so, within the next six months.
“Students can’t just test overnight,” Nuechterlein said. “There are students who want to prep, there are students who are not math- or English-ready . ... Students are going to be unprepared.”
For the most ambitious, high-achieving students, the tests are another stressful hurdle to clear as they apply to the most selective colleges. And for many other students, the test scores — even if not required for admission — are mandatory if they want to qualify for some financial aid programs or, on some campuses, certain degree programs.
Critics of standardized tests have argued that they mirror, or exacerbate, societal inequities, in part because students from unstable homes or with limited resources cannot afford SAT or ACT tutors or testing preparation classes, or may not know of free resources such as Khan Academy. Even before the pandemic, some schools had moved to make the scores optional to avoid creating another barrier for students.
Then the pandemic hit, spurring a crisis response when students literally could not access spaces in which to take standardized tests, said Dominique J. Baker, a University of Delaware associate professor of education and public policy who studies admissions policies.
“There were a number of institutions that never would have chosen to have gone test-optional except the pandemic made them,” she said. “Those institutions, by and large, are going back to requiring test scores.”
MIT, Georgetown University and the University of Florida are among schools which quickly chose to reinstate the requirements, with MIT announcing the change in 2022. Many others have spent the years since the virus arrived studying what effect going test-optional had on their admitted classes.
At Brown, Yale and Dartmouth, officials said they had found something surprising: Considering test scores would help them identify more promising applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds, not fewer. After looking at their own data, leaders at the three Ivies say they concluded SAT and ACT scores are highly predictive of students’ academic performance in college, more so than high school grades. They also found that some less-advantaged students withheld their scores when sharing them would have boosted their chances.
Depriving admissions officers of SAT and ACT scores meant they were less able to evaluate an applicant’s chances of thriving at Brown, Provost Francis J. Doyle III said in an interview this month.
“Our analysis suggested our admissions could be more effective if we brought back testing as an instrument,” Doyle said.
The University of Texas at Austin is also choosing testing again, the school announced recently. Jay Hartzell, the school’s president, said he and others worried the cost and preparation associated with the tests could keep students from applying. But about 90% of UT Austin applicants in the latest round took the SAT even though it was optional, Hartzell said. And the school found that students who declined to submit scores were less successful once enrolled.
More highly selective schools will probably follow UT Austin’s lead in the months to come, said John Friedman, a professor of economics and international and public affairs at Brown. He was one of the authors of the study from Opportunity Insights, a nonprofit at Harvard University, on standardized test scores and student performance at a dozen “Ivy-plus” universities.
“It’s not just about the test scores being a good predictor,” he said. “We show in the paper that students who attend a school, having been admitted without a test score, perform at the bottom of the distribution.” He said schools should look at their own data to determine their policy.