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Some top colleges are once again requiring scores from racially biased standardized tests as part of applications.
When Ivy League universities joined hundreds of other schools in dropping SAT and ACT scores as admission requirements in recent years, it seemed the high-stakes tests were going the way of pay phones and videocassette tapes.
Last week, however, Dartmouth College became the third influential school this year, along with Yale and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to bring back the SAT as a requirement for admission — and some experts believe others could soon follow suit. Between schools’ backtracking and a recent high-profile study (covered in The New York Times) suggesting standardized tests actually don’t harm college diversity, testing proponents say predictions of its demise are premature.
But a new report released in late February by FairTest pushes back, arguing that the tests — which multiple studies show are biased against Black students — aren’t poised for a widespread comeback.
“A few colleges who are obsessed with elitism and ranking and sorting, who are more interested in finding the students who need the least education in order to claim success, have returned to a metric that allows them to sort through their candidates and find the pool they’re interested in,” says Akil Bello, senior director of FairTest.
The report, co-authored by Bello and Harry Feder, FairTest’s executive director, argues that data supporting the use of test scores is too narrowly focused on elite universities, overemphasizes freshman GPAs, ignores long-term college grades, and doesn’t consider graduation rates. A prospective student’s high school transcripts, the report says, are better predictors of college accomplishment than rigid, high-pressure tests that can be gamed with coaching or high-priced tutors.
“Using the SAT as the gatekeeper for higher education turns out to test one thing above all else: existing station in life,” according to the report. “Mind training, intellectual and personal habits, and comfort with the underlying content that is developed over the course of years all funnel into greater likelihood of doing well.”
Questions over how well test scores predict college success date back decades, but the current debate began around 2020, when the pandemic disrupted the testing industry — and protests following George Floyd’s murder led college officials to improve equity in higher education, including admissions.
Acknowledging evidence that the SAT and ACT have built-in class and race biases, dozens of exclusive private colleges like Harvard University and selective public schools like the University of California system changed admissions policies to test-optional.
The results have been mixed: Some studies indicate that eliminating standardized tests in admissions did little to help Black and Latino students get into college. But the University of California found the change expanded the pool of qualified students, and increased campus diversity.
The January study by Opportunity Insights, a nonprofit think tank examining poverty and economic inequality, found that standardized tests help more than harm Black and Latino students, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds.
According to that study, the tests help admissions officers at elite schools identify minority students who can succeed in college regardless of their background. It also found that freshmen at schools like Stanford and Princeton who took standardized tests to get in got better grades in their first year of college than students who opted out.
“Higher SAT/ACT scores are associated with higher college GPAs — even when comparing students from different socioeconomic backgrounds,” the study reads. It concludes that “standardized test scores may have more value for admissions processes than previously understood in the literature, especially for highly selective colleges.”
But the FairTest report contends the Opportunity Insights study missed the big picture.
The vast majority of public and private colleges remain test-optional or don’t require ACT/SAT scores to get in, according to the report. It also points to MIT, which, after going test-optional, graduated its most diverse class in 2023.
Most admissions officers “have come to the understanding that requiring tests operates as a barrier to otherwise qualified candidates from disadvantaged and underrepresented backgrounds in higher education,” the FairTest report states. By relying on grades and other holistic considerations, schools “can select students for enrollment who will thrive in college and benefit greatly from advanced education.”
Ultimately, according to the report, “what the SAT, and standardized tests generally, seem to pick up better than anything is whether your origins lie in the winning side of the existing birth ‘meritocracy.’”
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