In April, the State University of New York (SUNY) announced that students applying to its four-year undergraduate colleges would no longer be required to submit their SAT or ACT scores. Vassar College, an elite liberal arts school in Poughkeepsie, dropped its standardized testing requirement for admission around the same time. And in March, Columbia University became the first in the Ivy League to go permanently test-optional.
These New York schools lead the nation in making their pandemic-era test suspensions indefinite, but others are likely to follow. Cornell has extended its test-optional policy through 2024, while Harvard has done so through 2026. A recent study by the National Center for Fair and Open Testing found that more than 80% of US colleges and universities didn’t require applicants seeking admission in fall 2023 to report SAT or ACT scores. This is in stark contrast to 2019 when more than half required standardized test scores to be submitted as part of their application process, according to Common App data,.
Why are colleges ramping up efforts to scrap standardized testing requirements? To get around an imminent Supreme Court strike-down of affirmative action, which benefits black and Hispanic students but penalizes Asian Americans.
Consider the average SAT and ACT scores for each of these racial and ethnic groups in 2021. Out of a possible SAT score of 1600, Asian Americans averaged 1,239; whites, 1,112; Hispanics, 967; and blacks, 934. Out of a possible ACT score of 36, Asian Americans averaged 24; whites, 21; Hispanics, 18.3; and blacks, 16.3. By going test-optional, colleges can, in the absence of affirmative action, continue admitting blacks and Hispanics (considered “underrepresented” in higher education) with low standardized test scores, while placing less value on the higher scores of many Asian Americans (considered “overrepresented”).
Organizations like College Board, which administers the SAT, ACT, and Advanced Placement (AP) exams, and the National Association of College Admission Counseling (NACAC) have made these intentions clear. In a playbook for “advancing higher education diversity goals,” the College Board describes, seemingly against its own economic interests, standardized tests and grades as “potential roadblocks” to furthering “diversity” on college campuses. The College Board’s “playbook” encourages admissions officers to consider “admissions materials that allow students to represent academic preparedness in multiple ways, in addition to or in lieu of standardized test scores.”
In an October 2022 webinar called “Preparing for a Supreme Court Decision Involving Race-Conscious Admissions,” NACAC officials similarly advised college admissions officers to “eliminate consideration of applicants’ ACT and SAT scores because they reflect a variety of biases related to race and ethnicity” as well as “stop considering Advanced Placement enrollment and AP exam scores in the admissions review process.” In fact, the NACAC went as far as to urge high school guidance counselors to “ensure that test scores of any sort do not appear on student transcripts because of their correlation with race and ethnicity.”
Those who believe that eliminating standardized tests from the college application process will “advance access” for disadvantaged students ignore the fact that this is exactly what the SAT and ACT have been shown to do. In 2007, the state of Michigan began requiring all public school juniors to take the ACT at least once. Joshua Hyman, an assistant professor of economics at Amherst College, found that for every 1,000 low-income students in Michigan who scored high enough to attend a selective college on an optional ACT, an additional 480 did so after being forced to take the exam. This boosted college attendance in Michigan, particularly among disadvantaged youth.
Anti-testing advocates also ignore that standardized test scores are often predictive of how a student will fare in college. A 2020 study from the University of California (which is prohibited by the California state constitution from using affirmative action in admissions) showed that “SAT and ACT test scores are positively associated with college success in terms of freshman GPA, graduation GPA, first-year retention, and graduation.” (Despite this finding, the University of California dropped its consideration of standardized tests from the application process permanently in November 2021.)
In the long run, eliminating the SAT and ACT to get around a Supreme Court strike-down won’t just hurt students who might have performed well on these tests; it’ll hurt those who might not have, too.
Renu Mukherjee is a Paulson Policy Analyst at the Manhattan Institute
