Ivy League Colleges Reinstating Standardized Testing Requirements

With 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.

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Renu Mukherjee

Renu Mukherjee is a visiting fellow at the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity.

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Columbia University

With 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.