Should a student take the SAT when most colleges don’t require it?
If a student is a high school junior hoping to start college in fall 2028, it’s a good time to be thinking about whether they should take the Scholastic Aptitude Test in the spring, since most colleges still say it is “optional.”
Despite widespread expectations that colleges would reinstate SAT or ACT scores as a requirement, that hasn’t happened yet. While a few dozen schools are again requiring test scores, a recent analysis by Fair Study found that, at the vast majority of colleges – 86% – they still are optional.
Test-optional, however, does not mean test-irrelevant.
The COVID pandemic obviously accelerated the test-optional trend because high schools and testing centers were closed. But there was a bigger conversation already happening about whether SAT and ACT scores were a fair measure of a student’s ability and how much weight colleges should put on them.
Now colleges have had several years to look at what happened.
The Ivy League schools – Harvard, Yale, Penn, Brown, Dartmouth, Cornell and, next year, Princeton and Columbia – came back to testing because they get thousands and thousands of applicants with 4.0 GPAs, AP classes and great extracurriculars, and they need another way to assess them.
That’s really the issue. A 4.0 at one high school isn’t necessarily the same as a 4.0 somewhere else.
But every college shouldn’t be copying Harvard or Yale. A school should be looking at their own data from the past several years and deciding whether test scores help them identify students who will succeed. If their data show that the test adds very little and requiring it discourages qualified applicants, then staying test-optional may make more sense.
Concerns that the tests are unfair are legitimate, but it’s more complicated than saying the SAT is culturally biased and therefore we should eliminate it. The bigger issue is opportunity.
A student at a great high school whose family can afford private tutoring, SAT preparation and multiple attempts has advantages. If you remove the SAT, though, affluent families still have advantages. They can afford private college counselors, essay coaches, expensive extracurricular activities, internships and all kinds of opportunities that can improve an application. So eliminating the test doesn’t eliminate inequality.
Rather, colleges need to look at the scores in context. A 1400 from a student who had very limited resources could tell you something very different than the same score from a student who had every educational advantage.
Test scores give colleges one more objective data point, but some parents hear “test-optional” and think, “Great, my child doesn’t need to take the SAT.” That’s not necessarily the strategy I would recommend. Some colleges say they are test-optional, but students who don’t submit scores are actually at a disadvantage.
I generally want to see the student take the SAT or ACT and compare their score to those of successful applicants at colleges the student is interested in, then decide whether submitting it strengthens their application. Testing well also may mean more merit and institutional aid. As an example, one of our students whose test scores hit a sweet spot at Pepperdine University was awarded an additional $12,000 in aid.
A blanket statement like “SATs don’t matter anymore” is too simplistic. College admissions has become much more strategic, and families need to be more strategic as well.
Standardized tests should help tell the student’s story. It shouldn’t become the whole story. Don’t build a child’s college strategy around whether a school says it’s “test-optional.” Build it around whether submitting the score helps the child at that particular college.
Brian Safdari, founder of College Planning Experts, is a Certified College Planning Specialist™. He and his team have assisted more than 7,500 students nationwide. For more information, visit collegeplanningexperts.com.
