Why don’t universities require ACT or SAT standardized tests for college admissions anymore?

Once a mainstay of applying for admission to college or university, using students’ scores from the ACT and SAT standardized tests have been abandoned by ever more institutions. Prior to the pandemic nearly half of colleges and universities had already adopted test-optional or test-blind admission policies.

However, the restrictions put in place to fight the virus closed many testing centers and the fear of catching it kept would-be test takers away. This accelerated a trend that had been growing over 50 years. Now over 80 percent of institutions no longer require the ACT or SAT as part of their admission policies. But why?

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Why don’t universities require ACT or SAT standardized tests for college admissions anymore?

The ACT and SAT are seen by some as being unfair, racist and not a true determiner of a student’s academic capability. These are just some of the reasons that standardized tests have been made optional. The score on the test has become a “barrier in both a psychological and tangible way,” according to Bob Schaeffer, the executive director of Fair Test.

On the one hand when a school publicizes the average test score, it discourages those with lower scores from applying. And when a school really does use test scores as part of admission selection, then it skews towards increased inequality, as Black and lower-income students tend to have a lower average score. Historically, the standardized test have benefited wealthy white males with college-educated parents.

The ACT and SAT are a weak predictor of undergraduate readiness

The effectiveness of the testing has been called into question and many believe the ACT and SAT tests are flawed. “[The SAT’s] efficacy as a predictor of college readiness has been challenged by researchers and college admission officers alike,” said Rob Granek, editor-in-chief of the Princeton Review. The journal stated that it “has never said was a good test or a fair one – has been a controversial exam since its beginning,” when commenting on the College Board’s announcement last year to move to a digital SAT.

According to FairTest, a non-profit advocacy group also known as the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, over 1,800 institutions no longer require applicants to submit scores. The move to make admissions test-optional or test-blind has been heralded by many, but not all.

Not everyone wants to get rid of the ACT and SAT

“Standardized testing, inequitable as it might be, is more equitable than any other criterion,” wrote Kathryn Paige Harden, a clinical-psychology professor at the University of Texas at Austin, in The Atlantic. “Studies suggest that the best policy might actually be to facilitate more high-school students taking the SAT, not abandon it entirely.”

Paige referred to the fact that more low-income students from Michigan attended four-year colleges after the state made the standardized test mandatory for all high school students. Her article addressed the fact that MIT, which had dropped the standardized test in 2020 and 2021, reinstated the testing requirement for 2023 fall admissions after it found more inequality in admissions without the standardized tests. “Not having SATs/ACT scores to consider tends to raise socioeconomic barriers to demonstrating readiness for our education,” wrote Stu Schmill MIT’s dean of admissions.

Schools that still require the ACT or SAT

While the vast majority of schools have made the standardized test optional, there are still institutions where they are required besides MIT. US News and World Report provides a list of universities and liberal arts colleges where the ACT and SAT are part of the admission process.