When the College Board canceled SAT testing in 2020, hundreds of colleges adopted test-optional admissions policies for that fall. The Urban Institute reported that the number of four-year colleges and universities going test-optional nearly doubled in one year, from 713 to 1,350.
Test-optional admissions had been spreading before the COVID pandemic, on the theory that standardized tests were inherently biased and discriminatory. The pandemic gave progressive college admissions offices an excuse to jettison an old tradition many blamed for campus and societal disparities.
By the fall of 2023, more than 80% of American bachelor-granting institutions had eliminated admission test requirements, according to FairTest, which advocates for such policies.
Eliminating the exams was intended to help disadvantaged students by replacing a vestige of systemic inequality with more accurate — more subjective — measures of students’ academic preparedness. The results were predictable.
A 2023 study by Harvard University economist Raj Chetty and his team demonstrated that the use of subjective criteria for assessing student applications benefits students from higher-income families and disadvantages academically promising students from lower-income families.