Test-Optional Isn’t Looking So Good

Few high school students have ever looked at a Saturday morning SAT or ACT and thought, “This is exactly how I want to spend my weekend.” But while standardized tests may be unpopular with teenagers, it is the children who are wrong—exams are one of the few remaining measures colleges can use to compare students from different schools and backgrounds.

The University of Wisconsin System, however, will continue to allow prospective students to apply without them. The University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents has extended its suspension of the ACT and SAT requirement through the 2027-28 academic year, even as research continues to point to the usefulness of standardized tests in predicting college success. 

It’s easy to see why. The tests are stressful, and the push to drop them began with concerns that they were biased against minority students. By dropping the requirement, the University of Wisconsin may hope to gain a competitive edge by attracting applicants who prefer not to submit SAT or ACT scores. But the research keeps pointing the other way. A University of California task force, cited in a later Dartmouth report, found that test scores line up more closely with college success than high school GPAs do, and grade inflation is the obvious suspect. Paired with grades, scores give a much fuller picture. 

Class rank doesn’t help much either, since it can’t be compared across different high schools. Standardized tests can. A test score means the same thing no matter which high school the student came from, which is more than anyone can say for a GPA. It’s one number universities can compare across every high school.

The test-optional era has given colleges a chance to see what happens when scores disappear, and the experiment seems to have failed. Dartmouth College spent four years letting applicants decide whether to submit scores before announcing in February 2024 that it was reinstating its requirement. Dartmouth’s research found that scores were “highly predictive of academic performance,” and its president said the data help the college find students it might otherwise miss. 

The college also found that low-income applicants often withheld scores even when those scores would have helped them stand out. Yale, Brown, MIT, and UT Austin have announced that their own test-optional policies didn’t work either. If Dartmouth looked at the results and decided test-optional admissions wasn’t working, the rest of us should at least ask why.

North Carolina offers an especially revealing example. Under state law, public high school students take the ACT as juniors, and the state Department of Public Instruction sends their scores to the UNC System. So even during the pandemic-era waivers, the system had scores for students who chose not to submit them. This is kind of an experiment in itself. 

At UNC-Chapel Hill, admitted students who submitted scores had a median ACT of 29 in 2022, compared with 25 for non-submitters. At NC State, the gap was even larger: 27 versus 22. 

If Wisconsin is comfortable benching the test, North Carolina has taken a more complicated path. In 2024, after years of waivers that began during the Covid-19 pandemic, the UNC Board of Governors approved a policy requiring test scores only from applicants with high school GPAs below 2.8. The Martin Center has argued that this leaves a curious gap at the state’s two most competitive universities, effectively making UNC-Chapel Hill and NC State test-optional. 

At UNC-Chapel Hill, 95 percent of freshmen admitted in fall 2022 had a GPA of 4.0 or higher, and none had a GPA below 2.99. That leaves admissions officers to separate thousands of near-identical transcripts using personal essays and letters of recommendation, which are more subjective and less reliable. Good luck with that.

Yes, standardized tests have their critics. But reformers have long argued that scores help students who didn’t grow up with every advantage stand out, and that is the point of a common measure. Grades can be hard to compare, so a shared test is the one thing that lets an admissions officer line up a student from one school against a student from another. Getting rid of the tests doesn’t make the playing field any more fair. 

For Wisconsin, skipping the SAT and ACT may make applying a little less stressful. Fewer Saturday mornings spent staring at a computer, too. But it also means giving up information about academic preparation that admissions officers can’t easily get elsewhere. Dartmouth and North Carolina offer good reasons to keep standardized tests in admissions. Wisconsin has decided to go without them for now. But if more universities bring testing requirements back, Wisconsin may have to take another look at its decision.

Reagan Allen is the North Carolina reporter for the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.