Universities Dropped the SAT Requirement to Help Disadvantaged Kids. Sometimes, It Might Do the Opposite.

A new study of Dartmouth College suggests that even good intentions can backfire.

Photo by Pang Yuhao on Unsplash

In 2020, a number of American colleges and universities suspended their SAT/ACT requirement for undergraduate admissions. The move was made by most schools after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic — school shutdowns and pandemic chaos had made administering the test fairly that spring pretty much impossible.

But this pragmatic move was also coupled with a larger push to re-examine the role of standardized testing. When the University of California (UC) system, for instance, decided to mostly roll back their SAT/ACT requirement, officials there set out to develop their own test to replace these standardized exams by 2025. (And if they fail to do so, they planned to drop testing altogether.)

“The main reason we are looking at SATs is because they are racist,” argued Kum-Kum Bhavnani, the chair of the system’s Academic Senate. “No one disputes that.”

UC officials had been pushing to drop the testing requirement for years before the pandemic hit.

“They really contribute to the inequities of our system,” UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol T. Christ said in 2019.

The pandemic gave testing critics the casus belli they needed to convince higher education to turn on the SAT and ACT, as countless institutions of higher education went test-optional. Many of these organizations promised to study the impact of the move and make a decision about whether to resume testing requirements in the years to come.

Last year, many of them decided that they’d be bringing back their testing requirements. Dartmouth College, for instance, decided to reinstate testing requirements for the Class of 2029.

A new study helps explain why.

A trio of Dartmouth researchers studied the student cohorts before and after the test optional policy went into place.

What they found is that students’ test scores were actually “strongly predictive of academic success” at the school, and that the scores were “significantly more predictive than other measures, such as high school GPA.”

That relationship between test scores and academic success appears to hold across income and demographic groups. And while the applicant pool was larger during the test-optional period, the makeup of the pool — as measured by metrics like the amount of first-generation college students — is about the same.

But the most stunning revelation from the study was the impact of the test-optional policy on disadvantaged students.

“Less and more advantaged students submit at similar rates given a fixed SAT score. But, these two groups SHOULD NOT submit at the same rate for a given score,” Dartmouth economist Bruce Sacerdote, who worked on the study, told me over e-mail. “Test scores are read in context not in an absolute sense. So many less advantaged students are withholding scores that would indeed significantly help their admissions chances.”

The study concludes that the “the data suggest that a test score optional policy leads large numbers of disadvantaged students to not submit scores when it would benefit them to do so.”

If you think about it, this isn’t a huge surprise. If submitting your test scores is optional, you as an individual student really have no idea whether submitting your score will help you or not.

“Even well-informed students cannot be expected to know how reading SAT scores in context is operationalized,” the study notes. “Given a test score of 1400 or more, first-generation applicants can multiply their probability of admission by 2.4 times by submitting scores. More broadly, less advantaged applicants with scores of 1400 and above can boost their probability of admission by 3.6 times by submitting scores.”

Sacerdote emphasized to me that the conclusions of the study — that test-optional policies harmed disadvantaged students — are based off the results specifically at Dartmouth.

“I think the most important fact is that the data is from a specific, very selective school,” he said. “We have already seen examples in other work that the impacts of test optional polices can differ by school and by applicant characteristics.”

But for Darmouth, the results were more than enough to bring back the testing requirement.

“Our bottom line is simple: we believe a standardized testing requirement will improve—not detract from—our ability to bring the most promising and diverse students to our campus,” they said in their announcement bringing back mandatory testing.

There is nothing stopping other colleges and universities from studying the impact of their own test-optional policies. We can only hope they’re as reflective as Dartmouth was if they find that these policies backfired.