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Voices & Opinion

The Decision to Reinstate Mandatory Standardized Tests for College Admissions Is a Mistake

We can create better ways to determine if an applicant from a less privileged background has what it takes to be successful at an elite institution

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the use of standardized test scores, like the SAT, as a component of undergraduate admissions. The majority of colleges and universities took advantage of this disruption to eliminate the use of standardized test scores. Even before the pandemic, more than 1,000 colleges and universities had either test-optional or test-blind policies. As the pandemic unfolded, hundreds of additional institutions followed suit. However, Dartmouth, Brown, Yale, and MIT recently announced they were reinstating mandatory standardized testing and, suddenly, SATs are in the news cycle again.

The standardized test landscape is an overly complicated system of options, and now, post-pandemic, highly selective universities and colleges are trying to decide whether to return to past practices of requiring test scores or commit to test-flexible, test-optional, or test-blind policies.

Test-required is when all applicants must submit an SAT or ACT score. Test-flexible is the model that Yale opted for, and this is when a test score of some sort is required—either the SAT, ACT, AP, or IB. Test-optional provides a situation where it is optional to submit standardized test scores. (The majority of the highly selective institutions are in this space and many, including the University of Michigan, Cornell, and Vanderbilt, are currently committing to this method.) Test-blind is when applicants are not allowed to submit test scores. This is the route that the University of California system has taken, and experts predict that more institutions will move in this direction.

The overwhelming majority of colleges and universities in the United States are broad-access institutions that do not require a standardized test score as part of their application process and, therefore, for most US college students, this is a nonissue. More than 80 percent of US colleges and universities do not require applicants to take standardized tests—like the SAT or the ACT. However, the news cycle is driven by elite institutions, not the institutions where most college students go to school.

Scholars such as Leigh Patel have argued against the use of standardized tests for college admissions, pointing to the fact that Carl Brigham, the creator of the SAT, was a member of the American Eugenics Society and that the use of standardized tests in higher education came out of the eugenics movement. According to Ibram X. Kendi, founding director of BU’s Center for Antiracist Research and author of the best-selling How to Be an Antiracist, “Standardized tests have become the most effective racist weapon ever devised to objectively degrade Black and Brown minds and legally exclude their bodies from prestigious schools.”

Given this context, what is the reasoning behind bringing back a required standardized test score? Dartmouth’s argument is that this will increase equity in the admissions process: “SAT/ACTs can be especially helpful in identifying students from less-resourced backgrounds who would succeed at Dartmouth but might otherwise be missed in a test-optional environment.” For an elite and highly selective institution like Dartmouth, an SAT score may seem less biased and may actually be less biased than an interview, essay, review of extracurriculars, and/or rank and status of the applicant’s high school. This begs the question that if a standardized test that has links to a eugenics movement is less biased than all of these other more biased measures, isn’t it time to rethink the way colleges select members of their incoming classes?

Unfortunately, the primary goal of an elite college is not to undo the privilege that comes with elitism. Within a prestige economy, elite institutions are in the business of selling prestige. In The Path to Free College, Michelle Miller-Adams raises this point in relation to the Varsity Blues college admissions scandal, stating that “the layers of privilege laid bare by the college admissions scandal begin at birth.” She reminds us that students from “less-resourced backgrounds” face opportunity gaps from prekindergarten through college.

A privileged birth prepares you for a life of privilege, and as my colleague Tony Jack, a Wheelock associate professor of higher education leadership and faculty director of BU’s Newbury Center, points out in his book The Privileged Poor, an explicit goal of an elite high school life of privilege is to prepare students for a college life of privilege at an elite college or university. I believe that the hardworking, creative, and equity-minded staff and leaders at our colleges and universities can create better ways to determine if an applicant from a less privileged background has what it takes to be successful at an elite institution. In addition to removing the barrier of a required SAT test score, we must also have the will and tenacity to do the work to close our society’s opportunity and equity gaps, to not just talk the talk, but to also walk the walk.

For institutions like Dartmouth and MIT that have moved to requiring standardized test scores again, it will be interesting to see if they admit more students from “less-resourced backgrounds.” One way to measure this is through tracking the number of Pell Grant recipients at these institutions. To qualify for a Pell Grant, a student must have a family income under a certain low threshold. When teaching and writing about college access, I often refer to the New York Times College-Access Index comparing institutions by the percent of Pell Grant recipients in attendance. It remains to be seen whether or not they will be able to increase the diversity of their incoming classes.

Mary Churchill is associate dean of strategic initiatives and community involvement, program director of higher education administration, and professor of the practice at BU’s Wheelock College of Education & Human Development. She can be reached at machurch@bu.edu.

“POV” is an opinion page that provides timely commentaries from students, faculty, and staff on a variety of issues: on-campus, local, state, national, or international. Anyone interested in submitting a piece, which should be about 700 words long, should contact John O’Rourke at orourkej@bu.edu. BU Today reserves the right to reject or edit submissions. The views expressed are solely those of the author and are not intended to represent the views of Boston University.