US Universities Moving Away from Test-Optional Admissions

Major US Universities are now moving away from the Test-optional admissions process. This shift in standpoint may have been influenced by the wish to promote equity among students. Moreover, standardized admission tests also make it easy to manage enrolments.

Recently, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the leading universities in the USA, announced that it was re-establishing one of its main requirements that applicants submit SAT/ACT scores while applying for undergraduate programs.

According to the University, they switched to test-optional admissions because of the pandemic. However, as most restrictions have been lifted by now, students can easily appear for the exams. It will also help socio-economically disadvantaged students to prove their aptitude.

Other universities that have followed this path are Georgetown University, Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of Georgia, and the University of North Carolina.

In the past few years, most major universities and colleges in the US were following a test-optional admissions path. However, more than 1600 educational institutions have now dropped this trend as pandemic restrictions have eased in the US and around the world.

However, this move has dismayed Experts and Activists who have argued that re-instating standardized admission tests as one of the major requirements will only broaden the economic and racial divisions in the US higher education system.

While most colleges that reinstated this requirement offered no explanation, MIT proffered several explanations. The University stated that standardized tests are necessary as they can be relied upon to assess a student’s academic status. These tests also aid in reducing income-based disparities, for instance, wealthier students can stuff their applications with extracurricular activities.

Georgia University, on the other hand, re-established its testing requirements for all its 26 campuses and then reduced the mandate to only three of its most prominent campuses.

The most likely reason for this course of action was that the university’s lesser-known 23 campuses were struggling to meet enrolment targets. It is hoped that now more students will apply to the lesser-known universities because of the test-optional mandate.

Georgetown’s Cente on Education and the Workforce also put forward another explanation. It stated that more and more institutions are now getting confident in their ability to structure their admitted classes to maximize revenues and that eliminating testing requirements would allow them even more freedom to do that.

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According to Mr. Bob Schaeffer, ‘The track record of test-optional institutions is that the diversity of their entering classes increases after dropping standardized exam requirements.’ Maybe this was the main reason why US institutions first decided to drop the requirements for standardized test scores, or in some cases refused to consider them.

Concurrently with MIT’s move, California State University System agreed to join the University of California system in abandoning its use of the SAT and ACT scores in admissions. It stated that the tests caused students to stress while providing institutions little benefit in finding the applicants best able to make use of an offer of admission.

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