The Weekly: The SAT is back in the business of elite college admissions
Student preparedness, AI, and the fact that test-optional was never about diversity.
Columbia University announced this month that it will once again require standardized test scores for undergraduate applicants beginning in August 2027, making it the final Ivy League school to reinstate test score requirements after most universities made them optional beginning in 2020.
Over in California, UC Berkeley faculty members published an open letter urging the UC system to reinstate SAT math score requirements for STEM applicants, arguing that campuses need a clearer way to assess whether students are prepared for college-level quantitative work. The effort has drawn more than 1,500 faculty signatures since June 5, including from 60 STEM department chairs across the system. The letter even spurred a second open letter earlier this week from UC Social Sciences and Humanities faculty urging the use of SAT reading and writing scores in admissions, which has drawn over 400 signatures in a matter of a few days. The UC Academic Senate has now committed to a “comprehensive review of key admissions policies.”
Many universities adopted “test-optional” policies during COVID (with some keeping the policy permanently) allowing students to decide whether to submit their test scores with their applications. Now with enough data to evaluate impact, the dominoes have fallen. Dartmouth was the first of the Ivies to reverse course following an internal review that argued that test scores were an “essential method by which Admissions can identify applicants who will succeed at Dartmouth.” Most of the Ivy League followed suit within months; Princeton and Columbia were the final holdouts.
Universities also framed test-optional policies as an equity win. Because SAT scores correlate with income, requiring them arguably screened out economically disadvantaged (and disproportionately non-white) students who could gain economic mobility from a university education. A policy born of pandemic logistics was quickly recast as a social justice measure. But admissions offices had a more pragmatic reason to keep it. As Colin Diver explains in Breaking Ranks, if only high scorers opt to submit their scores, a university’s reported average goes up — and since SAT scores carry significant weight in the U.S. News “Best Colleges” rankings, test-optional turned out to be a quiet gift to the rankings game.
Columbia’s own data bear this out. According to reporting in the Columbia Spectator based on the school’s admissions data, Columbia’s test-optional policy resulted in a 35 point bump in freshman average SAT scores. But this single stat masks the reality that more students are being admitted to these highly selective universities who lack the foundational knowledge to succeed in high-level coursework.
This is exactly the problem that Svetlana Jitomirskaya and Zvezdelina Stankova, both mathematics professors at UC Berkeley who initiated the open letter, have discussed widely in the media, sharing their experiences with the policy in recent op-eds. They explained that freshman students would come in lacking a conceptual understanding of basic algebra, forcing lectures to pivot from their intended topics to basics like fractions. “With one hand, I am teaching a complex integral, and with the other hand, I am telling them how to solve a simple linear equation like 7x – 2 = 5,” Stankova told The Atlantic in an interview.
The classroom has become bifurcated between prepared and unprepared students, and that split doesn’t just limit learning — it also limits the conditions for intellectual exchange. Classrooms are meant to be places of deep discussion, constructive disagreement, and boundary-pushing inquiry. But that kind of friction requires a common floor: everyone in the room has to be able to engage the material at a common critical level before anyone can push past it. If high-level courses are instead reduced to teaching middle-school content, open inquiry cannot thrive; students cannot thoughtfully discuss the implications and applications of mathematics if students are still working out the basic algebra underpinning it. Students who are prepared fail to get the education they were promised, unprepared students inevitably fall behind, and professors get understandably frustrated. The classroom no longer become places worth attending.
The COVID era test-optional policies were a forced, yet illuminating, admissions experiment showcasing how useful it can be to revisit standard policies and their underlying assumptions, kick the tires, and use data to make informed policy decisions. The argument to bring back test scores to selective admissions rests on a variety of studies, internal reports, and analyses showing decreased preparedness of students, while simultaneously showing little if any improvements in equity goals.
While the data tell a clear story on the role of test scores in selective admissions, there’s another reason for requiring them that didn’t exist in 2020: AI. Personal admissions essays can be produced in seconds. Grade inflation and student cheating are rampant. A sit-down, proctored standardized test to assess a student’s knowledge base in reading, writing, and math might be the only viable option we have right now for selective universities until we can sort out how to teach (and learn) in an era where everything else that goes into an admissions packet has become gameable.
The test-optional era might have made universities look better in the rankings and feel better about their policies, but the data suggests it made students worse off. Universities are supposed to be in the business of honest assessment — of ideas, of evidence, of their own assumptions. The SAT debate is, in the end, a test of whether they can apply that standard to themselves.