Why Colleges Are Bringing Back the Standardized Testing Requirement
By: Frances Xing
In 2022, MIT announced that they were bringing back the standardized testing requirement in their college admissions. As of 2024, Dartmouth, Yale, Brown, UT Austin, and more have also joined, turning against the growing number of test-optional schools.
The common argument for removing standardized tests from college admissions is that it favors students with high-income families, making college admissions unfair to students of low income. High-income families have the money to hire tutors, buy practice books, and in extreme cases, pay for others to take the test for them. While it is commendable for colleges to attempt to reduce socioeconomic inequality, this has actually backfired as some high schools started making it easier for their students to get good grades, as GPA becomes a main deciding factor. Known as grade inflation, this makes it difficult for college admissions officers to truly determine which student would succeed at their school, just based on high school GPA.
On the other hand, research has proved that standardized tests like the SAT or ACT are more accurate in determining a student’s college GPA than their high school GPA. A 2024 study by Opportunity Insights found that SAT scores paralleled first-year college GPAs, while students who submitted only high school GPAs, ranging from 3.1 to 4.0, all had around a 3.5 in college GPA. This shows how high school GPA does a poor job of predicting a student’s academic success in college. In that same study, they also compared students from disadvantaged high schools and advantaged high schools, and their SAT score vs. college GPA. What they found was that when students from disadvantaged high schools and advantaged high schools had the same SAT scores, they had the same performance in college GPAs. This proves that standardized testing scores are able to predict college success for students of both the upper and lower classes.
As new studies reveal how standardized testing is a strong component in predicting students’ success in college, more and more institutions are bringing it back as a requirement, to help determine which students would succeed at their school. If this trend continues, we could see standardized testing scores become a more important factor of college applications.
Sources:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-perfect-score-cheating-on-the-sat/
https://opportunityinsights.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/SAT_ACT_on_Grades.pdf
https://www.vox.com/24083809/college-university-sat-testing-requirement-ivy-league-yale