The Ivy League’s Testing Turnaround Proves the SAT Is Still an Engine for Upward Mobility

W ith Columbia University’s recent announcement that it will reinstate standardized-testing requirements for undergraduate admissions, the Ivy League’s great “test-optional” experiment has officially failed. What began as a temporary concession to the 2020 pandemic lockdowns has ended in a complete institutional retreat. Columbia is the last Ivy League school to once again require applicants to submit their SAT/ACT scores.

While these universities originally cited the 2020 pandemic lockdowns as their reason for waiving the SAT and ACT, this policy was later repurposed as a tool for racial balancing. Under pressure from activist administrators who characterized standardized testing as inherently biased, Columbia and its peers sought to admit greater numbers of underrepresented minorities by going test-optional. Their argument was that racial disparities in SAT and ACT scores were byproducts of the tests themselves, rather than a reflection of deep-seated gaps in academic preparation.

Yet, the data suggest otherwise — and have finally forced a retreat. When Yale announced its own policy reversal on May 27, Pericles Lewis, dean of Yale College, admitted that “academic excellence is the foundation of the university” and that standardized test scores are “strong predictors” of a student’s future academic performance. But we already knew this. In an era of rampant grade inflation, how a student fares on the SAT or ACT has proven far more predictive of college success than high school GPAs.

The need to rely more heavily on testing is an inevitable consequence of a broken K–12 grading system. Recent studies have shown that while the average high school GPA has climbed steadily over the last few years, student proficiency in reading and math has stagnated or declined. When an A becomes the default grade in most high schools, a perfect GPA loses its signaling power. Universities are forced to look elsewhere for proof of academic readiness.

Look no further than a recent plea from more than 1,000 STEM professors across the University of California system, who collectively urged their schools to reinstate testing requirements for undergraduate admissions. The faculty noted that preparation gaps have grown so severe that they are forced to reteach basic middle school mathematics in their classes.

The second reason Columbia and its peers have rushed to reinstate standardized testing has received less attention. However, for schools dedicated to promoting “equity,” it’s arguably the more important revelation: As it turns out, the SAT and ACT remain the single most effective tool for identifying gifted low-income students who might otherwise go unnoticed.

Dartmouth was one of the first to prove this point when it moved to reinstate its standardized-testing requirement more than two years ago. In early 2024, at the request of President Sian Leah Beilock, four professors conducted internal research on the college’s test-optional policy. What they found was striking: Standardized test scores actually helped Dartmouth admissions officers identify high-achieving, less-advantaged applicants.

There were three reasons why. First, without a universal benchmark, admissions officers naturally placed greater emphasis on subjective metrics — such as essays, extracurricular activities, and guidance counselor recommendations — which tend to favor wealthier applicants who have access to greater resources. Second, test-optional policies created an information gap; because low-income students often attended high schools less familiar to Dartmouth, evaluating their academic preparation without an SAT or ACT score became much more difficult. Third, the researchers found that many low-income applicants withheld their scores under the test-optional policy out of caution, even when those scores were high enough to significantly boost their chances of admission.

Last year, a widely shared study by economists Raj Chetty, David Deming, and John Friedman confirmed that subjective admissions criteria disproportionately benefit wealthy applicants. They found that children from families in the top 1 percent are more than twice as likely to attend an Ivy Plus college as middle-class students with similar SAT or ACT scores. Two-thirds of this gap was due to higher admissions rates for high-income applicants with comparable test scores. This advantage, Chetty and his co-authors found, was driven by the following three factors: legacy preferences, athletic recruitment, and weight placed on non-academic credentials such as leadership traits and extracurricular activities.

This is exactly why the Presidential Council on Yale Admissions, a nine-member group formed last fall to evaluate the school’s admissions process, recommended that it bring back standardized testing. Lewis, who chaired the council, noted that such a policy shift “can help identify well-prepared candidates, especially those from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds.”

In the end, test-optional policies harm the very individuals they were designed to help. They not only place underprepared students in academic environments where they may struggle to keep up, but they also create an admissions disadvantage for high-achieving, low-income students. The data have long shown that the SAT and ACT are tools for upward mobility, not the impediments that critics make them out to be. Kudos to the Ivy League for finally taking note — and reversing course.