"Prompted by Covid restrictions beginning in 2020, nearly 2000 colleges across the US became test optional virtually overnight. I do believe that some of the less competitive colleges will continue to be test optional, or test blind, maybe forever. But as for the nation’s most competitive colleges, expect more and more of them to require tests one again."By Neil Chyten

It was nice while it lasted, wasn’t it? In retrospect, the thought of not having to do all that test preparation and still have hopes of admission to your dream college seems too good to have been true. Alas, the era of test-optional admissions is coming to an end—but only for some colleges. We had already seen a trickle, a crack in the foundation, of our house of cards. Without tests, something was always missing – some objective measure of a student’s likelihood of college success to balance off the completely subjective 4.0 grading scale that differed from school to school as much as the highest mountain peak in the Andes differs from the highest peak in the Adirondacks.

Prompted by Covid restrictions beginning in 2020, nearly 2000 colleges across the US became test optional virtually overnight. But one by one they started to come back, fearing that the lack of data would cause them to make serious mistakes in the admission recruiting process. One of the first re-adopters was Georgetown. It was quickly followed by MIT, Georgia Tech, all the Florida public colleges, the US Naval Academy, the US Military Academy, and more recently, Dartmouth College and Yale University. Harvard and most other Ivy League colleges will follow soon. Then, the country will be a checkerboard of colleges that require ACT or SAT, and those that don’t. And even though the University of California system has said they are permanently test optional, they have also stated many times that they will be developing their own standardized tests.

Anyway, I have a bit of a different point of view on testing, having spent most of my professional life developing strategies, writing books, and training students are these tests. I believe that dreams take hard work to achieve, and learning to take tests is part of that process. I also believe that both SAT and ACT provide useful information to colleges, especially when combined with other factors such as GPA, academic rigor, recommendations, extracurricular activities, essays, research, AP tests, and a few others. SAT and ACT may not be panaceas, but they are useful tools that colleges can and should use when making their admission decisions. As much as you may not like them, you must admit that a student who scores in the lower 10% will have a difficult time succeeding at a highly competitive college, and a student who scored in the top 10% is far more likely to be able to meet the challenge of college-level courses. Indeed, these findings have proven consistent over multiple case studies.

In mid-February, 2024, Dartmouth announced its intention to once again require tests. Yale followed suit a few days after. Now, the only thing preventing Harvard from being the next shoe to drop is the fact that it has become a lightning rod of controversy over the past year and does not want to make a rash decision that it will later regret. But it is just a matter of time until Harvard joins the herd of colleges that are jumping of the test-optional bandwagon. Harvard has long been an advocate of the SAT (and ACT) because it provides a wealth of information in a very succinct manner that does not require deep analysis. Indeed, the SAT was first created by and for Harvard College as a way of maintaining the meritocracy inherent in its admission process. But I digress.

Columbia has indicated that it is permanently test optional. The same goes for the University of California system. We shall see. I do believe that some of the less competitive colleges will continue to be test optional, or test blind, maybe forever. But as for the nation’s most competitive colleges, expect more and more of them to make the announcement that will make many high school students’ hearts sink to the floor: “We will be requiring standardized tests once again beginning next year.”