[Matt note: while there has been considerable attention paid to the reinstatement of SAT/ACT requirements at the Ivy League universities and other selective colleges, the vast majority of US students still enroll in institutions that are still test optional. Over 10 million first-time freshmen enroll in US 4-year not for profit colleges each year (public and private), while the 32 colleges and universities appearing in the headlines over the past 4 years due to a return to SAT/ACT mandates enroll only about 1.5% of the US total. If the UC system decides to reinstate an SAT/ACT requirement, that would increase the test-requiring portion to about 2%.]

The Chronicle of Higher Education offers an article titled 'How the SAT Survived its Own Funeral" that examines the history of the SAT on its 100th anniversary, and considers its current awkward place in the US education system.

[Excerpts]

On June 23, 2026, the SAT will turn 100. The centenary will not be celebrated. The Educational Testing Service (ETS), which administered the test for 77 years, has effectively relegated the SAT to research and archival spaces on its website; the College Board, which owns the test, gives no indication that a centenary is approaching. The SAT has been so long a part of America’s societal furniture that the silence is weird. And revealing. Institutions do not commemorate what they cannot cleanly account for; they become amnesic. And the SAT, at 100, is an institution with a great deal to be amnesic about.

This is not to say the test is dying; quite the opposite. In 2025, the number of test takers passed the two million mark for the first time since 2019. After a pandemic-era interregnum, during which most colleges suspended testing requirements, the SAT is back: Out of 12 so-called Ivy Plus institutions — the Ivies plus the University of Chicago, Duke University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Stanford University — eight now require a standardized test, normally the SAT or ACT, from applicants. MIT was the first to do so, in 2022, and Dartmouth College the second, in early 2024. Dartmouth’s careful rationale, at once confident and placatory, explained that standardized tests are not only the best predictors of academic success, but also an “especially valuable tool to identify high-achieving applicants from low-income, first-generation college-bound, and rural backgrounds, as well as applicants from under-resourced high schools.” Some version of this is on many a college website. A long and much-discussed January 7, 2024, piece in The New York Times by David Leonhardt, “The Misguided War on the SAT,” complete with graphs from the latest research, was the herald of the reinstatement movement.

Pressure to reinstate standardized testing is now coming from what is arguably the most progressive, equity-minded group of research universities in the country: the University of California system. On May 25, five math and STEM faculty at UC Berkeley sent a letter to UC system leadership and “the people of California,” calling for reinstating the SAT/ACT for STEM majors. Within days, the letter received hundreds of signatories; as of mid-June, the number is north of 1,800. Separately, non-STEM faculty — humanities, social-science, and professional-school professors — issued a concurring letter on June 11 about the need for requiring standardized testing for reading and writing as well; this gained over 400 signatories in four days. [Actually above 700 as of June 24.]

The non-STEM faculty letter calls the test-blind policy at the University of California a “failed experiment.”

Institutions do not commemorate what they cannot cleanly account for; they become amnesic. And the SAT, at 100, is an institution with a great deal to be amnesic about.

“Holistic review” — which claims to evaluate “the whole person,” without relying only on test scores to determine applicants’ merit — came to colleges’ rescue. But just what is it — in specific terms, not gauzy language? Meritocracy made more digestible? Just where do SAT scores fit in? No one, outside an admissions office, quite knows what the weighting is, college by college. The opacity is the point. “Flexible consideration” of the whole application is the brochure language; institutional flexibility to make choices that need not be publicly justified is the internal one.

The recent “Report of the Yale Committee on Trust in Higher Education” puts it this way: “The holistic-admissions process, however adeptly designed and applied, is subjective and hard to explain. The available evidence also suggests that it disproportionately benefits wealthy applicants.”

The peculiar nature of the American admissions system becomes most visible with international comparison. Other elite systems are frank about what they do. Take Oxbridge as an example. Three A’s at A-level are the floor for admittance to either the Universities of Oxford or Cambridge. This is stated without embarrassment. Contrast this with the contradictions on Harvard College’s admissions page: “The SAT or ACT is required of every applicant, barring exceptional circumstances, even if you’ve taken A-levels or the International Baccalaureate.” This is followed by: “There are no score cutoffs, and we do not admit ‘by the numbers.’” And an important admission is then added: “SAT and ACT tests are better predictors of Harvard grades than high-school grades.” That is, we require the test, deny the floor, and praise the test’s predictive power.

The Yale report points out the contortions with unusual candor. “Under the current system,” it says, “Yale informs potential students that everything matters, leaving applicants scrambling to second-guess what the university wants.” The suggested remedy: “A floor such as a minimum SAT score or a Yale-specific entrance exam would ensure that no student is admitted without the requisite academic preparation and ability.” Yale’s SAT interquartile score range is 1480–1560. Nevertheless, “everyone who wants to apply should apply” is the current demotic line.

The anniversary party ETS threw in April 1998 for its 50th birthday seems to have been quite the hoopla. Searchlights as stagecraft over Trenton, N.J.; a videotaped speech by the vice president then, Al Gore; even Tom Brokaw in the flesh. And the 93-year-old Henry Chauncey took a valedictory bow. No doubt, eminent educators were present. A celebration is usually easy to understand; a refusal to commemorate — collective amnesia about an important approaching anniversary — less so. The burden of this essay has been to marshal some evidence for why the SAT, a fixture in American culture, doesn’t get even a small birthday cake in 2026.

The silence is choric. Honesty would require ETS and the College Board to open up their ledger books (and who likes being audited?): [Carl] Brigham and eugenics; the utilitarianism of mass sorting; the malodorous scab of persistent racial gaps, and the resentment engendered by scoring hierarchies; class reproduction and the test-prep industry; the risk of public affront to the anti-testing movement, which believes that testing is an insult to equity. Then there is the College Board’s history of simply figuring out what the SAT does, what it measures in the first place — moving the goal posts through successive renaming. In practical terms, ETS would also have to explain the hasty purging of the SAT from its website after 2024.

What about the great universities? Why would they send admissions deans or presidents to a party when they’ve spent at least 20 years building an infrastructure that tries to manage the SAT’s verdict? The research in favor of reinstatement at elite colleges might be getting clearer, but it is not easily communicable and involves many public contradictions. Another kind of silence emanates from elite liberal-arts colleges, which mostly remain — apart from the service academies — test-optional. Institutional ambiguity allows Amherst and Williams Colleges to expand their applicant funnel while (one might say) exploiting maximal discretion. “Send standardized-test scores if you like; not sending them won’t hurt you” is the vague signal that allows selective liberal-arts colleges to claim that they are at once as rigorous as any Ivy League institution and more equity-conscious without having to rank their commitments when they are in conflict.

This is why the SAT cannot be celebrated with spotlights and shrimp. It is too useful a tool to discard, but too freighted to celebrate. The old meritocratic fable is well past its expiration date; no serious person believes that a three-hour test and a number should be dispositive, or that they trump family and income advantages. No test can tell us what justice and fairness require. But tests do produce numbers, and numbers can embarrass us. After a hundred years, that may be the SAT’s strangest achievement: not that it solved the problem of American merit, but that it keeps making the problem visible.

 
As mentioned above, many non-STEM UC faculty members have issued and co-signed their own open letter calling for reinstatement of SAT/ACT reading and writing, and math requirements at UC schools.

[Excerpts]

We are University of California faculty from the social sciences, humanities, arts, business, law, education, and other non-STEM fields. We are writing to endorse our STEM colleagues’ earlier open letter regarding the math component of SAT/ACT and argue for also using the verbal reasoning component of SAT/ACT in undergraduate admissions.

We first want to thank our mathematics colleagues for explaining the harmful impact that a test-blind admissions policy has had on math and other STEM education at the University of California. Some of us did not sign the mathematics letter because it was framed as a statement from STEM faculty, but we agree with its conclusions. As a complement to their focus on STEM preparation, we would like to highlight concerns from our own fields.

While our STEM colleagues understandably focused on problems caused by the absence of SAT/ACT-math in undergraduate admissions, we emphasize that University of California undergraduate admissions would also benefit from considering the SAT reading and writing section or the ACT English and reading sections. As carefully documented in Section III and the various appendices of the Academic Senate’s Standardized Testing Task Force report [PDF], standardized test scores predict important outcomes like college grades and graduation rates. For example, Table 6 of the report shows that reading and writing scores predict performance across fields, especially in the social sciences and humanities. As artificial intelligence becomes more capable, it is arguably more important than ever for students to be able to think through and compose sound arguments on their own, to comprehend the texts they read, and to recognize weaknesses in the arguments of those texts. The growing use of AI also makes essays a less reliable indicator of these abilities. Without foundational literacy, students face difficulties across university disciplines. Eliminating the metrics that diagnose these preparation gaps imposed significant barriers for underprepared students and their instructors alike.

The absence of SAT/ACT-math is felt well beyond STEM education. Many social sciences and applied fields, as well as some humanities fields, rely heavily on statistics and quantitative reasoning. Students without a solid grounding in algebra struggle in statistics, which affects learning across fields. Even some non-quantitative fields (e.g., analytic philosophy) require students to use forms of reasoning closely related to mathematical thinking. Not surprisingly, Table 6 of the Senate task force report shows that SAT-math predicts grades in social science classes, and to a certain extent in humanities classes, even after controlling for high school GPA and the verbal reasoning component of the SAT.

We support restoring the use of both the verbal and math aspects of SAT/ACT to undergraduate admissions. As our colleagues’ letter noted, SAT/ACT-math will benefit STEM education and we add that social sciences, humanities, and other fields will also benefit from the use of standardized testing in admissions, including the reading and writing components of the tests. Reasonable people can debate how much weight SAT/ACT should carry relative to other parts of applications and policies may vary by campus and degree program. However, it is unreasonable to require all undergraduate degree programs at all campuses to be test-blind in an era of K-12 grade inflation and the growing use of AI in admissions essays.

The lead time in implementing a return to a sensible admissions policy makes it urgent to begin that correction soon. Test-blind admissions are already locked in for Fall 2026 and Fall 2027 entering classes. If the University of California does not reverse course in the next month or two, the Fall 2028 entering class will be admitted on a test-blind basis with all the problems that implies. If the University of California does not change policy in the 2026-2027 academic year, this will lock in test-blind policy for the Fall 2029 entering class as well. This leaves at least three to four more years of a system where underprepared students are accepted only to struggle with their academic goals, while qualified California students with high potential from diverse backgrounds may be squeezed out of the UC system and left with no choice but to attend alternative public segments, go out of state, or turn to private institutions instead. California families deserve an admissions process that considers all available evidence of academic
preparation.

Therefore, we call for the UC Academic Senate and the UC Regents to give up the failed experiment of the last six years and return to including both the math and the verbal reasoning components of SAT/ACT as part of undergraduate admissions.

 
Additional quotes from UC faculty regarding the proposed timeline to possibly reintroduce SAT/ACT mandates are provided by Berkeley's The Daily Californian. One academic characterized the UC administration as "tone deaf" for its deliberate approach to the issue.

[Excerpts]

Faculty advocating for the reinstatement of SAT and ACT requirements are criticizing the timeline produced by the UC system’s Academic Senate to revisit its standardized testing policies, saying the process is moving too slowly.

The UC Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools, approved a roadmap June 5 outlining its plan to research potential changes to admissions policy. The committee formed two work groups: One will study the efficacy of standardized testing in first-year admissions, and the other will look at the UC’s “A-G” course requirement for California first-year applicants.

If approved by the UC Board of Regents, changes would affect fall 2028 applicants at the earliest, one year later than called for in a petition signed by more than 1,500 UC STEM faculty.

Electrical engineering and computer sciences chair Jelani Nelson argued the process was redundant, and the topic was already thoroughly researched by UC faculty on the Academic Council’s Standardized Testing Task Force in 2020.

That report supported keeping standardized test scores as a part of the admissions process based on a comprehensive analysis of test score data, but was rejected by the Board of Regents, which favored then-UC president Janet Napolitano’s proposal to gradually transition to a UC-specific test or test-blind admissions. A feasibility study rejected the possibility of creating a UC standardized test in 2021.

“We’re kind of just redoing work that’s already been done,” Nelson said. “It’s not clear how we’re going to do that work anyway, given that we don’t have the new data (on students admitted without the SAT).”

Office of the President spokesperson Stett Holbrook stated in an email that the new work groups would consider changes to College Board practices and the impact of AI on today’s educational landscape.

They will also consider whether scores on the SBAC assessment — a standardized test used to evaluate high school performance — would be a feasible alternative to the SAT and ACT as a standardized test used in admissions, an idea that was rejected by a similar Academic Senate study group in 2021.

“We have data from when we had (the SAT). We have data from when we stopped using it,” said Frank C. Worrell, a UC Berkeley education professor who was part of that study group. “So in some sense, there’s a natural experiment that took place.”

Nelson said the proposal felt “tone-deaf” given the urgency of UC faculty’s calls for more rigor in the admissions process.

In an email, Nelson expressed optimism that the regents would be receptive if the Academic Senate ultimately recommends to reinstate standardized testing, unlike their rejection of the Standardized Testing Task Force’s recommendations in 2020.

Worrell said he expects the results of the work groups to be similar to the outcomes of previous studies.

“We know what the results of the SBAC are, the report is there, the result of the committee on the SAT is there,” Worrell said. “This committee is not going to find anything different.”

 
As touched on above, the report produced by a committee established by Yale president Maurie McInnis made recommendations regarding potential changes to Yale's admissions policies. The paper, released by the committee in April 20026, titled "Report of the Yale Committee on Trust in Higher Education" advised significant changes to Yale's current policies, including consideration of minimum SAT/ACT scores (or scores on a Yale-specific test) for admissions consideration, and de-emphasizing admissions advantages for athletes, legacies and children of faculty and donors.

[Excerpts]

Reform undergraduate admissions. Building greater trust in this area must begin with a thoughtful, accurate, and robust accounting of how undergraduate admissions actually works. The university also bears an obligation to articulate a clear set of goals and priorities in admissions, and to conduct the process with as much fairness and respect for the aspirations of young people as it can muster. We recommend that the university embrace a standard of candor: It should only use criteria for admission that it is willing to describe publicly and defend openly. The top priority in admissions decisions should be academic achievement.

The current system of preferences for certain groups of applicants (including varsity athletes, legacies, and children of faculty, staff, and donors) distorts the admissions process by reducing the number of slots available to high-achieving applicants who do not fit into one of the favored categories. We recommend that Yale reduce preferences for special classes of applicants.

We also believe that the admissions system can be made more effective and less onerous for applicants by establishing and making public a minimum standard of academic achievement necessary for consideration. Under the current system, Yale informs potential students that everything matters, leaving applicants scrambling to second-guess what the university wants. A floor such as a minimum SAT score or a Yale-specific entrance exam would ensure that no student is admitted without the requisite academic preparation and ability. It would also spare a meaningful number of applicants time and emotional investment in an application that will not succeed.

 
National Review weighs in with a piece titled "The Ivy League’s Testing Turnaround Proves the SAT Is Still an Engine for Upward Mobility."

[Excerpts]

Colleges are coming around to a hard truth: Test-optional policies harm the very students they were designed to help.

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.

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.

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.

 
Forbes has also chimed in on recent testing developments, with a piece titled "The SAT is Back...and This Time it’s Not going anywhere."