Inside Higher Ed cites research from FairTest regarding the still-low percentage of colleges requiring SAT/ACT scores.

[Excerpts]

In the six years since most colleges and universities suspended admissions testing requirements amid the COVID-19 pandemic, many have reinstated the requirement or announced plans to do so, including all of the Ivy League universities. But data collected by FairTest, an organization that advocates against the use of tests in admissions, shows that the requirements have not, in fact, had a major resurgence.

In the organization’s analysis of 2,247 admissions policies for the 2026–27 admissions cycle, only 7 percent—or 161 colleges—require test scores for admission. The vast majority, 86 percent, are test optional—students may submit scores if they so choose—while 4 percent are test free, meaning they will not look at test scores. Only 11 institutions introduced new testing requirements for this admission cycle, but another 10 switched from test required to test optional this year. The total number of colleges requiring test scores increased by just one.

Those numbers shift only slightly when looking at top-ranked institutions. Among top institutions—any university that U.S. News & World Report has included in its top 100 ranking—11 percent require scores, versus 82 percent that are test optional. Two Ivy League institutions, Columbia University and Princeton University, remain test optional for this admissions cycle but will switch to requiring scores next year; two other Ivy-Plus institutions, Duke University and the University of Chicago, are remaining test optional indefinitely.

Harry Feder, FairTest’s executive director, said the discourse around test requirements distracts from the fact that the vast majority of schools are continuing with test-optional admissions.

“The narrative that is being put forward … says, ‘Oh, the world is going back to testing.’ But it’s just not true, and it’s a story that is essentially being driven by what the Ivy Plus are doing or have done, which is going back to testing for their own reasons,” said Feder.

The debate also embroils public institutions that have tightened their testing policies. The university systems in Florida and Tennessee are the only public systems that require standardized test scores at every campus. But the University System of Georgia increased the number of institutions where scores are required from three to seven for this admissions cycle; for consideration at some of the remaining 19 colleges, students must submit test scores if their grade point average falls below a certain threshold.

Three other flagship universities—Ohio State University, Purdue University, and the University of Texas at Austin—also require scores. But generally, public institutions require tests slightly less frequently than colleges over all (6 percent).

Lisa Carlton, president of the Independent Educational Consultants Association, which represents independent college counselors, said that, even though 90 percent of colleges do not require test scores, most counselors encourage students to take the tests anyway. Test-optional colleges all consider test scores differently, and some admit very few students who don’t submit scores despite not requiring them. In the 2025–26 application cycle, the portion of applicants who sent in test scores (51 percent) surpassed those who did not for the first time since 2020, according to Common App data.

“What we’re seeing is, because of grade inflation, it’s very hard for the colleges to get a full academic read and some of them really want to see that score as a validator, if you will,” she said. “But on the other hand, there are schools that are genuinely test optional and have found a way to evaluate candidates without test scores.”

 
Despite the retention of test optional policies by the vast majority of colleges, The College Investor states that SAT/ACT test score submission by applicants continues to increase, and has reached majority status for the first time in 6 years.

[Excerpts]

For the first time since the 2019-20 admissions cycle, more Common App applicants submitted a standardized test score than didn’t.

Common App’s End-of-Season Report for 2025-26 shows 779,300 first-year applicants reported an SAT or ACT score (up 11% from last season) while 748,028 applied without one (down 5%). That’s a reversal of the pattern that has held since Covid upended college entrance exams six years ago.

The reversal happened without colleges forcing it. Only 5% of Common App’s 1,146 member institutions actually required a test score to submit an application in 2025-26. That figure was 4% in 2023-24, an all-time low, and roughly 55% back in 2019-20 before COVID-19 disruptions pushed all but 11% of members to drop their testing requirements. Ninety-five percent of member colleges still don’t ask for a score. Students are sending them anyway.

A few details worth noting from the headline:

Test reporters grew, non-reporters shrank. The 11% jump in score reporters came alongside a 5% decline in non-reporters, meaning this wasn’t just growth in the applicant pool. Total applicants rose only 2%, to 1,527,328. Students actually moved from one column to the other.

The movement is small. 779,300 versus 748,028 is a margin of about 31,000 out of 1.5 million applicants, or roughly 2 percentage points. This is a crossover, but it will be interesting to see if this trend continues this year.

Every subgroup moved the same direction. Common App notes that across first-generation status, underrepresented minority status, fee waiver eligibility, and ZIP-code income, score reporting grew faster than non-reporting, even in the groups that still report test scores at lower rates overall.

Test requirements are coming back. The share of colleges requiring a test increased from 4% to 5%. Small in absolute terms, but it’s the first move upward in this metric since the pandemic.

 
Another recent Inside Higher Ed article cites research that takes issue with the claim that test optional policies result in the enrollment of undeserving students at selective colleges. The research also showed that selective colleges spend far more per student than other institutions.

[Excerpts]

Despite the Trump administration’s claims that some of the nation’s most selective colleges have admitted legions of students with low test scores to advance racial diversity, new research shows that’s largely not happening.

Instead, a working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research this week used decades of federal data to lay out the reality: The most accomplished high school graduates—who tend to come from higher-income families—make up the vast majority of students enrolled at the nation’s best resourced, selective public and private institutions. Meanwhile, their peers with lower standardized test scores, who are more likely to come from lower-income families, more often end up at higher education institutions that spend far less on each student’s education—if they go to college at all.

For example, in 2019, spending on per-student instruction increased 29 percent for every 100 average SAT points of enrolled students, according to the report. At the same time, roughly two-thirds of students at Ivy League and other top-50 private universities—and more than half of students at state flagships—came from families in the top income quintile. Income distributions of students at less selective public and two-year colleges were broader and more reflective of national income distributions.

Given those disparities, “it’s high time we interrogated what we are doing with this admissions system,” Jesse Rothstein, director of the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-author of the paper, told Inside Higher Ed.

“The Supreme Court’s Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard decision or the attacks on DEI presume that the only legitimate way to do things is to admit the students with the highest SAT scores,” he said. “Arguably, what you should be doing is admitting the students who have the most ability to benefit, and it’s not at all clear that that’s best captured by prior achievement.”

But even as selective institutions have become more reliant on using test scores as an admissions metric over the past 50 years, the resource gaps between the wealthiest universities and the rest have widened.

In 1969, per-student instructional expenditures at the most selective institutions (enrolling the highest-testing students) were about double the expenditures of the least selective colleges.

By 1993, more selective colleges were spending 150 percent more per student than the least selective colleges. By 2019, they were spending 200 percent more. According to the paper, the widening gap came during “a period of substantial state disinvestment from public higher education in terms of states’ block funding allocations.” Universities that admitted higher-testing students “were relatively more successful at privatizing and raising greater replacement revenue from their students,” and also used private gifts and government research contracts to subsidize instructional activities.

The paper describes the widespread acceptance of this resource stratification as “meritocratic consensus,” which Rothstein argues is overdue for reconsideration.

“It’s taken for granted that the objective of college admissions is picking out the smartest students, and that somehow it will all be better for everybody if they go to the most selective schools, and the students who aren’t as well prepared go to less selective schools,” he said. “There’s just not much evidence for that assumption.”

“If we really think that the route to a middle-class job is for everybody to get a college degree, then we need to make it feasible for students to get college degrees who were not the top of their class in high school,” Rothstein said. “If in fact it’s the case that more resources spent on lower-achieving students would be productive, then we’re leaving a lot of value on the table by not doing that.”

 

Two Republican California state senators are putting pressure on University of California administrators to rapidly reinstate SAT/ACT requirements.

[Excerpts]

The raging debate over standardized test requirements in the University of California’s admissions policy may soon enter the California State Capitol.

In a letter to university leadership, two Republican lawmakers urged the UC system to move quickly to reinstate the use of SAT and ACT scores in undergraduate admissions. And one lawmaker plans to introduce a bill about it in the next legislative session.

The issue first came under the national spotlight in June, when hundreds of UC faculty from science, technology, engineering and mathematics disciplines signed an open letter calling for the reinstatement of tests like the SAT and ACT in the admissions process. The faculty cited widening gaps in math ability among students in their classrooms. Soon after, non-STEM faculty initiated a letter of their own, which has been endorsed by more than 900 professors.

But not everyone agrees. The University of California Student Association, which represents more than 237,000 undergraduates, expressed deep concern over racial and social disparities that it said standardized tests would bring into the college admissions process and drew attention to a marked rise in freshman applications since the SAT requirement was removed in 2020.

To make an informed decision, the UC Academic Senate announced a formal review process of its policies and sped it up such that a recommendation is expected by June next year. The earliest a change could be enacted, per this timeline, is in the 2027 admissions cycle for the cohort entering university in fall 2028.

But that’s not fast enough, according to state Sens. Rosilicie Ochoa Bogh, R-Yucaipa, and Roger Niello, R-Fair Oaks, who asked the university to move without delay and provide legislators with more information on how it plans to proceed.

“I’m hoping they can resolve this issue and incorporate the SATs and ACTs for admission consideration starting next fall in 2027, rather than getting everything squared away not until 2028,” Ochoa Bogh said. “Because that’s when we lose a whole cohort of students that will be basically unprepared. So my hope is that the UC Regents can make a decision by the end of this year.”

In line with the federal government’s push to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion practices in higher education, Ochoa Bogh said standardized tests were important to reverse an alleged trend of students not getting accepted to universities because of “an emphasis on DEI.”

Meanwhile, when asked for his opinion at a press conference earlier this week, Gov. Gavin Newsom said he had “feelings” about it but was wanted to “see the data” on it before saying anything more.

“I talked to the UC president and members of the board and expressed that point of view not just publicly but also privately,” Newsom said. “The data needs to bear out the ultimate determination on this. But again, there’s some contra data coming out and suggesting different things.”

While professors advocating for the return of the SAT say the students entering their classrooms are increasingly under-prepared for university-level math, the university’s timely graduation rates just hit all-time highs. In the 2024-2025 school year, the university’s freshman four-year graduation rate reached 74% while the transfer two-year rate surpassed 66%. Both mark significant increases over the last decade. The SAT and ACT requirements were eliminated from the UC’s admissions policies in 2020.

 
Michael Torres (the director of legislative strategy at Classic Learning Test) has written an article that criticizes efforts by the College Board and ACT, Inc. to limit competition from the CLT while lobbying for statewide contracts and having their products mandated by name in state laws around the US.

[Excerpts]

In the early years of the Classic Learning Test’s existence, we believed that our fight for acceptance as a college entrance exam nationwide would happen in admissions offices. We were wrong. The legacy tests have lobbied to weave themselves into myriad state government mandates nationwide, making the college entrance exam business as political as it is academic.

Knowing this, the SAT and ACT are lobbying aggressively to try to maintain their political moat. In several states — including Georgia, Oklahoma, Texas, and more — they’ve hired lobbyists, even if one or both had not previously had one, and worked side-by-side to oppose bills that would merely make CLT legal. Thus, what would otherwise be a relatively mundane conversation between admissions officers and the makers of a newer standardized test is instead a pitched political battle.

In 2001, Congress passed the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. With that law, the federal government enforced nationwide accountability on public schools via testing requirements, including an English and math test in 11th grade. At the same time, Colorado and Illinois became the first states to require all public high school juniors to take the ACT, paying for the mandate through the state budget.

To relieve the government-created problem, the Obama administration began issuing ESEA waivers for 11th grade testing in 2011 and then passed the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) in 2015, giving states the “flexibility” to adopt a “nationally recognized” assessment as their official, state high school exam. Thus, by adopting the SAT or ACT as the government test, states could officially comply with federal accountability laws, eliminate their often unpopular state tests in high school, and give every student a free, college admissions score.

Thanks to the allure of multi-million-dollar government contracts, both exams had transformed into remarkably similar assessments based on the same standards. And the arena of competition between the two similar products migrated from admissions offices and family rooms to government buildings.

Now, a huge portion of students who take the SAT or ACT don’t do so by choice or to earn admission to college. They take one or the other to meet government mandates.

According to our analysis, more than 800,000 of the 1.38 million students (nearly 58 percent) who took the ACT in 2025 did so because their state government uses it as their government test or to give public schools accountability grades. More than 140,000 will soon add to that tally as the Illinois state government switches from the SAT to the ACT this coming school year. For the SAT, the number is approximately 640,000 of the 2 million students who took it last year. (Matt note: the actual number of students engaged in SAT School Day in 2025 was 1.36 million (68% of all SAT takers among the high school class of 2025)).

But it doesn’t stop there. With the SAT and ACT intertwined with federal assessment mandates, state lawmakers began to put their product names into state laws governing numerous other state policies. These include publicly funded scholarships, graduation testing requirements, state accreditation programs for private schools, and even school choice programs.

In Georgia, for instance, the state law governing the publicly funded Zell Miller scholarship, which pays 100 percent of in-state tuition for tens of thousands of students, names specific SAT and ACT scores. In North Carolina, the state tied school choice program dollars to the ACT. Ohio’s school choice program requires private schools to use the SAT or ACT if they don’t want to use the public school test. The list goes on, in nearly every state.

Whether or not that happens, though, we at the CLT will continue going state-to-state to request that lawmakers stop protecting the SAT and ACT by name in law. And we have no doubt that those two legacy companies will use every ounce of their considerable lobbying power to ensure that politicians shield them from competition.

 
The US Army may require minimum test scores (SAT/ACT, or the Army ASVAB test) for ROTC officers. The Hill has the story.

[Excerpts]

The Army is eyeing new minimum academic standards for college students in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC), but not without some internal drama.

The service branch issued fresh standards earlier this month, only to pull them days later amid differing opinions and an apparent lack of consultation with some senior leaders.

Under the withdrawn standards, incoming ROTC cadets would have to meet one of three academic benchmarks: score a 20 on the ACT, a 1000 on the SAT or test in the 50th percentile on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB), a standardized test on science, math and language.

“The Army must cultivate intelligent and adaptive officers to build a lethal and ready Army prepared to deter, fight, and win our nation’s wars. The strength of our Officer Corps is the strength of our Army,” Jay Hurst, who formerly served as the assistant secretary of the Army for manpower and reserve affairs, wrote in an internal Aug. 5 memo, which was obtained by The Hill.

The new requirement was set to take effect in January next year. Starting Jan. 1, 2027, all students seeking to contract into SROTC must get a 110 on the ASVAB or provide proof that they met or exceeded “prescribed scores” on the SAT and ACT, the internal document said.

Days later, the memo was rescinded.

The undersecretary of the Army, Mike Obadal, said it requires “further staffing and analysis,” according to an internal Aug. 12 memo, which was reviewed by The Hill.

The New York Post reported on Friday that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was angry that the memo was rescinded. Hegseth’s office referred The Hill to the Army.

The rescission prompted gripes among some defense officials, who privately argue the service branch should have minimum standards in line with Hegseth’s push to raise standards for military officers, which has also included a focus on fitness and grooming.

The Army indicated that imposing standards is not dead but would require more input from senior leadership.

“Part of the discussion was if the standards were high enough,” one U.S. official said, adding there is a desire within the service branch to make standards more “stringent.”

Others question if ACTs and SATs are reliable measures to assess an officer’s future performance.

“The SAT has not historically been a measure that is predeterminative of officer performance, and would serve to exclude candidates that would benefit from Army training, and the Army would benefit from developing the talent,” a former senior defense official, granted anonymity to speak candidly, told The Hill on Wednesday.