Forbes covers a serious technical error that occurred on the March 8th SAT:

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The March 8, 2025, SAT administration was supposed to be a routine test for students across the country, but what transpired was a digital disaster that left thousands of students frustrated and uncertain about their futures. The College Board, the organization behind the SAT, is now scrambling to offer solutions, but unfortunately, the damage has been done.

The Technical Glitch That Disrupted Thousands

On test day, a technical glitch in the digital SAT platform caused many students to have their tests automatically end before finishing. The issue appeared to be related to the platform’s timing system, which was designed to submit the test automatically at 11:00 a.m. local time. For some students, the system prematurely cut off their tests, regardless of whether they had completed their work. This error disproportionately affected students who started later in the testing window and those taking the test under special accommodations, such as extended time.

Since the verbal section is administered first on the SAT, followed by the mathematics section, most affected students lost time primarily on the math portion of the test. Students whose tests began no later than 8:36 a.m. with standard timing (2 hours and 24 minutes) would have completed their exams before the 11:00 a.m. cutoff and thus were unaffected. The verbal section was affected for some students as well.

The glitch was a global issue. It affected students differently depending on their testing center’s location, timing, and whether or not they received timely instructions from proctors to restart their devices to prevent the error. Many students were left with incomplete tests, especially during the math portion.

Others were left scrambling with little guidance from the College Board as the situation unfolded.

 
CBS News has more details on the SAT testing problem:

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A technical issue impacted thousands of students taking the SAT last weekend, the College Board, which administers the test, said.

The College Board said more than 268,000 students took the SAT during the weekend of March 8-9. An issue automatically submitted some students' tests before their time was up, impacting more than 8,800 international and 1,200 domestic test takers.

Several thousands of other students in the Americas may have also lost testing time if they were asked to reboot their devices to try and prevent the auto-submit error.

At least one district in the Pittsburgh area, the Knoch School District, sent a letter to students and families notifying them of the issue.

"We deeply and sincerely apologize to the students who were not able to complete their tests, or had their test time interrupted, for the difficulty and frustration this has caused them and their families," the College Board said in a statement posted on its website.

The College Board said students whose tests were automatically submitted will get a refund and a voucher for a future test. Students can decide whether to keep their scores or cancel them and take a makeup test on March 22. The College Board also says it won't submit the March 8 test scores unless students ask.

"We are communicating with the higher education institutions and scholarship organizations where students have requested to send their scores from the March 8 exam so they understand the issue and hold students harmless. We are highly confident that our members will provide flexibility around any deadlines, as they have in the past," the College Board said.

 
Ohio State (with an undergraduate enrollment of 45,000) will reinstate an SAT/ACT requirement for all applicants:

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Ohio State University announced this week it will once again require ACT/SAT scores for first-year applicants, starting in 2026.

Five years ago this week, Ohio State shut down due to COVID-19, and it has not required test scores since. OSU said the pandemic caused disruptions in traditional testing, but now the university said it is time to end its test-optional pilot program.

“Our goal is to find and admit students who will succeed at Ohio State, and test scores provide valuable insight into academic success at our university,” Executive Vice President and Provost Ravi V. Bellamkonda said.

Ohio has 13 traditional public colleges, and Ohio State is the first among them to announce a full return to requiring test scores. The other 12 public universities are all test-optional in various forms, so Ohio State is set to be the only public university requiring test scores for all first-year applicants.

Colleges like Kent State and Ohio University have committed to long-term test optional application requirements, where many others have only announced they will be test-optional through 2025 or 2026. At some universities, test scores are required for certain majors or scholarships, but not for general admission.

“The ACT/SAT score complements other measures to create a fuller picture of future academic success at Ohio State when used as part of a holistic review process,” Vice Provost for Strategic Enrollment Management James Orr said. “Our analysis shows Ohio State students who submit test scores have higher grade point averages and are more likely to progress through the university.”

 
In contrast to Ohio State, Carleton College in Minnesota has announced that it will make its current test optional policy permanent:

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Carleton recently announced its decision to implement a permanent test-optional policy for admissions. The change, announced on Feb. 13 in a newsletter by College President Alison Byerly, marks the college’s embracing of a five-year pilot program originally created to support applicants during COVID-19, suspending the requirement that applicants submit standardized test scores.

Through the guidance of the college’s Admissions and Financial Aid Committee (AFAC) who advises and sets policies for the Admissions and Financial Aid Offices, the college recently decided on its new policy. According to Carleton Admissions’s statement, the conclusion “follows extensive analysis, discussion, and community feedback, including an externally conducted study that showed Carleton’s holistic application review process is effective at assessing the academic readiness of each student, regardless of whether or not they submitted test scores.”

A critical component of the admissions process at Carleton is to make the application process as accessible to as many people as possible. Part of the pilot-program for the test-optional process was to understand how to evaluate applicants without a data-point of their test scores.

Vice President and Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid Art Rodriguez ’96, explained that the Admissions committee saw that once test scores became optional in 2020, there were “increases in applications to the college … specifically, we saw increases from international students applying to [Carleton].”

Byerly explained the reasons behind becoming permanently test-optional: “The test-optional policy allows each student to make the best case for themselves and makes Carleton appealing to a wider range of prospective applicants.”

It was also acknowledged that years of work were put into analyzing the beneficial effects of the policy, with AFAC reaching out to other institutions, such as Bowdoin College, that have experience with test-optional admissions. These schools provided guidance on the implementation of the policy and helped make the transition as seamless as possible.

 
Harry Feder of FairTest offers the organization's response to a letter sent by the US Department of Education's Civil Rights Division to US colleges suggesting that the Supreme Court's decision outlawing race-based affirmative action in the Students for Fair admissions case indicates that colleges might be investigated for attempting to circumvent the SFFA decision by de-emphasizing SAT/ACT test scores.

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Late on Valentine’s Day 2025, Craig Trainor, the Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights published a Dear Colleague letter on the DOE’s plans for enforcing its interpretation of the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (SFFA) that crash landed at the doorsteps of the country’s educational institutions. While we at FairTest are appalled by the overreach of the letter beyond the SFFA decision and its blatant attempt to browbeat universities into abandoning all efforts to make educational opportunity and quality education equal, fair, attainable and compelling for everyone, not to mention the retrenchment of all efforts to address existing real discrimination in education, we wish to address specifically the suggestion in the letter that test optional or test free admissions policies would violate Title VI or the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause. The relevant language in the letter states:

“Relying on non-racial information as a proxy for race, and making decisions based on that information, violates the law. That is true whether the proxies are used to grant preferences on an individual basis or a systematic one. It would, for instance, be unlawful for an educational institution to eliminate standardized testing to achieve a desired balance or to increase racial diversity.”

This statement is premised on several flawed assumptions. First, it assumes that schools abandon testing requirements solely to increase racial diversity. It is incumbent upon universities to articulate why they maintain the testing policy that they do.

There are many reasons to abandon test requirements: the tests are poor measures of the habits and skills necessary to succeed in college and the workplace; they are tests of speed and nerves rather than intellectual ability, deep and critical thinking, or habits of persistence and determination; and the scores correlate fabulously to family income and wealth and thus using them as a major admissions criteria will severely disadvantage poor and socioeconomically challenged students. Perversely, because of the latter statistical truth, a push from the Trump Administration for test-based admissions will disadvantage the very working-class voters whose interests the Administration purports to represent. We recommend that colleges craft and explain why they adopt their testing policies as a reflection of their educational philosophy and overall opportunity mission.

Second, the OCR letter assumes that standardized test scores are actually objective merit-based criteria for university admissions. The very notion of holistic admissions practiced by selective universities belies this claim—college life and success cannot and should not be reduced to a test score that does not even claim to be an objective content test of substantive material an entering college freshman arguably should have mastered. The only historically proven element of SAT/ACT validity as an admissions indicator is a very modest additional predictive element in combination with grades for a student’s first year college grades. That small correlation dissipates over the course of a college career and does not particularly correlate to graduation rates. There is a reason universities look at grades, essays, extracurricular activities, life circumstances, and increasingly actual student work for admissions—those are far greater indicators of future societal and personal success broadly defined by college attendees and, more importantly, graduates.

In fact, Chief Justice Roberts in his majority opinion in SFFA expressly endorses the concept of holistic admissions. Even experience borne of race – much less multivaried non-racial factors -- can be considered in determining college admissions. He states:

“[N]othing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration or otherwise. . .. A benefit to a student who overcame racial discrimination, for example, must be tied to that student’s courage and determination. Or a benefit to a student whose heritage or culture motivated him or her to assume a leadership role or attain a particular goal must be tied to that student’s unique ability to contribute to the university. In other words, the student must be treated on his or her experiences as an individual . . .”

Chief Justice Roberts seems to think applicants are more than just an SAT score.

The Dear Colleague letter is plainly an attempt to bring higher education to heel and attack the institutional autonomy underlying the American university system and its admissions process. Universities would do well to respectfully resist.

FairTest maintains the hope that colleges will maintain control of their admissions policies developed based on the needs of their institution and the fit of applicants to the myriad programs offered at a given university. If test optional and test free policies are working for the institution by creating a larger, more qualified, more socioeconomically representative and just more interesting student body on your campus – as many institutions have found to be the case – rest assured there is nothing in the SFFA decision that mandates abandoning those policies. Any increase in minority admissions will be used as a pretext for the Trump Administration to investigate admissions policies regardless of a school’s efforts to comply with the law and further its own educational mission and priorities. We recommend adherence to institutional integrity rather than attempting to comply with a flawed incoherent policy statement in advance.

 
The faculty at highly selective Claremont McKenna College has voted to recommend a reinstatement of its former SAT/ACT requirement. An op-ed in the Claremont Independent supports this development:

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The CMC faculty voted to recommend that the Board of Trustees reinstate the school’s standardized testing requirements. The Board should listen.

While no metric is perfect, standardized tests are perhaps the best tool admissions offices have to fairly evaluate students’ academic promise. A faculty report at Dartmouth found that SAT scores were “highly predictive” of first-year success. At UT Austin, when controlling for other academic indicators, students who submitted test scores had a 0.86 percentage point increase in their first-year fall GPA relative to those who did not. If CMC’s goal is to accept students of the highest academic caliber, standardized tests offer critical insight.

Of course, scores aren’t infallible. A professor interviewed for this story remarked that standardized test scores are often influenced by exogenous factors like test formatting and mathematical notation. Also, limited access to testing centers has created issues in the past, although the new adaptive digital SAT will make administering the test easier.

Regardless, tests are certainly more challenging to exploit than most—if not all—other criteria.

High school GPAs, for example, are subject to grade inflation—a problem that, although widespread, is more prevalent at wealthier schools. Not to mention, it is practically impossible to determine the extent to which the new generation of AI-savvy applicants use ChatGPT for their high school courses, further reducing the reliability of grades as a predictor of one’s performance.

Essays are also a subpar tool. In the best of circumstances, they can provide deep insight into the character and prowess of applicants. But they might also reflect applicants' access to high-quality college counselors or adept ChatGPT use. Additionally, multiple studies show that essay topics are highly correlated with income, and disadvantaged students often feel forced to “sell their pain.”

Extracurriculars, too, don’t say much about a person’s academic merit. They might indicate one’s potential for community engagement, but they could also indicate that a student had the leisure time to join clubs and participate in service activities. It’s much easier for someone who doesn’t have to take care of their siblings or bring in extra family income to participate in extracurriculars.

Recommendations are also skewed by wealth. Letters from private and wealthy public schools can have more of an impact than those from lower-income public schools. Additionally, admissions officers from wealthier schools often have connections at universities and can make personal phone calls that may boost an applicant's chances.

Ultimately, admitted students must match their schools. As the CMC professor interviewed for this story said, “College admissions should be a matching process where students and campuses look for good fits. Policies that reduce transparency or the provision of information to students, parents, and colleges tend to make that matching process harder to navigate and make people less satisfied with their outcomes.” Clear, objective criteria are the best way to support CMC’s mission and future students.

 
Another opinion piece in the CMC student paper takes the opposite view, arguing for the retention of the test optional policy:

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The Claremont Independent Editorial Board has argued that standardized tests are the most objective metric in predicting college success, but this claim ignores substantial evidence demonstrating their flaws.

First, they referenced a Dartmouth study to argue that standardized scores are more predictive of academic performance in college and that it helps identify more high-achieving students. This study is incredibly context-specific. Dartmouth’s analysis relies on internal admissions data from an already selected applicant pool, meaning it doesn’t account for students who were dissuaded from applying by the barrier of standardized testing.

If standardized tests were truly a measure of student ability, there would be a clear difference between those who didn’t submit test scores — but the data tells a different story. A 2020 American Educational Research Journal analysis of 100,000 students across 28 test-optional U.S. universities found that students who didn’t submit standardized test scores performed just as well in college as those who did. It showed that high school GPA was a stronger predictor of college success than SAT or ACT scores, illustrating that standardized testing isn’t as effective a predictor as it is made out to be.

A landmark study from the University of Chicago found that after implementing the test-optional policy for the first time, first-year students performed at the same academic level as those who submitted test scores without reducing retention rates. Most importantly, the test-optional policy at UChicago led to a 24 percent increase in first-generation and low-income student enrollment. By eliminating test barriers, colleges were able to foster a more diverse applicant pool still able to excel at an elite institution.

Research conducted by Opportunity Insight indicates that standardized tests have a stronger correlation with total family income than with college success. In fact, “children of the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans were 13 times likelier than the children of low-income families to score 1300 or higher on SAT/ACTs.” Likewise, the University of California System reports that requiring standardized testing largely eliminates high-achieving, low-income applicants.

By adopting test-optional policies, universities cultivate a more diverse applicant pool — regardless of financial privilege, everyone has a fair shot at higher education.