Nobody likes the SAT. It’s long, it’s tedious, and it’s stressful. Millions of high schoolers were surely relieved when, in the 2020–2021 admission cycle, the majority of four-year colleges decided not to require SAT or ACT scores — Princeton among them. At the time, Princeton and others announced “test-optional” policies as a temporary policy during the COVID-19 pandemic. Years after the pandemic, however, Princeton has kept the policy in place.
When the Class of 2027 applied to college, 80 percent of schools were still test-optional, both as a holdover of COVID-19 and as a response to years of mounting skepticism and concerns about standardized testing. But the tide is turning. MIT and Georgetown were once the lone exceptions among the “Ivy-plus” schools, reinstating testing requirements after the worst stages of the pandemic had passed. This month, Dartmouth and Yale announced that they will require standardized testing of some kind going forward as well. Just this Tuesday, Brown University reinstated the requirement. These schools found that test-optional policies both made it harder for them to identify the best applicants and harmed, rather than enhanced, diversity efforts. It’s time Princeton follows the lead of its peer institutions and reinstates a standardized testing requirement.
Two main criticisms have crystallized from the standardized testing debate in recent years. The first is that a three-hour standardized test isn’t an accurate measure of ability. This is an attractive argument for those of us who believe in a more holistic definition of intelligence beyond test-taking ability. The problem is that it’s not quite true: test results are not only good predictors of academic success in college, but “the single greatest predictor of a student’s future Yale grade,” and “highly predictive of academic performance at Dartmouth.” Dartmouth and Brown researchers found that high SAT and ACT scores were much more predictive of high college GPAs than high high school GPAs. The predictive power of scores holds across income and racial categories.
Why are standardized tests the best predictor of student success? It is not because the SAT and ACT are flawless — rather, it stems from high school grade inflation. From 1998 to 2016, the average high school GPA has increased by 0.11 points, while the average SAT score has decreased by 24 points. Forty-seven percent of high schoolers now graduate with grades in the A range. Admission departments at the most elite colleges are receiving tens of thousands of applicants with perfect or near-perfect high school GPAs, and they have little way to distinguish who will struggle and who will thrive in a tough academic environment. Simply put, A grades don’t mean what they used to, and they are no longer sufficient proof of academic ability.
Other critics argue that the SAT and ACT favor higher-income and non-minority students, fueling fears that standardized testing is the enemy of diversity efforts. It’s true that there is a strong statistical relationship between family income level and race with SAT and ACT performance. White and Asian students from privileged backgrounds consistently outperform Black and Brown students from disadvantaged backgrounds on these exams. The disparity in scores across race and income groups is irrefutable — however, the real implications for equity look quite different.
It’s first worth noting that standardized testing is not actually to blame. Common sense would suggest that wealthier students perform better because they have access to outside preparation. To test this theory, consider the National Assessment of Educational Process (or NAEP). The NAEP is a mandated test taken by most of the nation’s students that involves no preparation. The results reveal that the racial and economic disparities in performance on the NAEP are remarkably similar to those in the SAT and ACT.
This suggests that outside preparation is not a main factor in the disparities present on the SAT and ACT — while SAT preparation may have a marginal impact, the real cause for disadvantaged students performing worse on standardized tests is plainly that they are disadvantaged systematically: they often attend schools with less resources, grow up in less educated households, and don’t have the same academic opportunities as their more privileged peers. While standardized tests can be cost prohibitive, both the SAT and ACT programs offer fee waivers to students from low-income backgrounds. In other words, the test isn’t itself artificially biased; its results reflect real inequities in American society.
The more important and counter-intuitive fact is that test-optional policies can actually put less-privileged applicants at a disadvantage. With test optional policies in place, MIT, Yale, and Dartmouth found that some disadvantaged students with lower-range scores were not submitting scores, when in reality a disadvantaged student with a comparatively lower score was more likely to be accepted than their privileged counterpart with the exact same score. According to Dartmouth’s dean of admissions, “there are hundreds of less-advantaged applicants … who should be submitting scores to identify themselves to admissions, but do not. Some were rejected because the admissions office could not be confident about their academic qualifications.”
Without standardized testing, greater consideration is paid to components of the application where wealth helps even more. Wealthier students can often take up time-consuming extracurriculars or expensive hobbies, work summer internships, or attend schools that offer lots of AP courses and more personalized recommendation letters. Similarly, given inconsistent standards and widespread grade inflation, admissions officers may show a preference for schools they are familiar with since they can make sense of the transcript. These schools are often private or public-magnet schools that send multiple applicants to Ivies every year. For these reasons, without the added metric of test scores, the value placed on other components of an application actually disadvantages students from under-privileged backgrounds.
As schools have reinstated SAT scores, we haven’t seen worse diversity outcomes: in the two cycles since reinstating testing requirements, MIT has still seen increases in the racial and socioeconomic diversity of its student body, and Yale and Dartmouth’s announcements expressed confidence that they will be able to do the same even after the prohibition of race-conscious admissions. Additionally, these schools feel better equipped to make the right decisions about who will be best prepared to handle the academics and make the most of their experience once enrolled. As President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 has argued, academic excellence can and must walk hand in hand with diversity. It’s Princeton’s time to reinstate test requirements, taking a step towards both goals.
Leighton McCamy-Miller is a first-year from Mill Valley, Calif. He is a prospective politics major. He can be reached at lm1879[at]princeton.edu.
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