Should High School Juniors Stop Worrying About The SAT And ACT?
From Forbes.com
Once upon a time it was a given, an American rite of passage. If you wanted to keep college in your future, you had to face one of the 800 pound gorillas of standardized testing—the SAT or the ACT.
Nowadays, that faceoff is no longer a certain thing. Over 2,000 U.S. four-year colleges do not require the test, according to FairTest, an organization that has advocated for limiting the entrance exams.
The movement toward test optional got a big boost four years ago when COVID made testing difficult (over 1,000 students were ACT/SAT-optional before the pandemic hit). Today, that 2,000 represents the majority of four year colleges in the country (in 2021, there were 2,637 four year colleges).
Readers can be forgiven for thinking that the movement had reversed itself. The press has given outsized attention to a handful of highly rejective schools that are reinstating the test. As Harry Feder, executive director of FairTest noted at a recent conference, Yale’s decision to return to an SAT requirement was covered by the New York Times, but the University of Michigan decision to stay test-optional, made the day before, didn’t get any such coverage.
Yale argued, as do many test supporters, that test scores allow colleges to spot “diamonds in the rough.” But a new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research adds to evidence that elite, highly rejective colleges are not unearthing many rough diamonds.