Dartmouth College announced this week that it’ll be reinstating its SAT requirement, starting with students applying for fall 2025 admission. That makes it the first Ivy League institution to do so after all eight dropped their requirements in response to the pandemic and concerns about equity. Those institutions were in good company, with most of the nation’s selective colleges either waiving admissions tests or going “test-optional” in recent years.
Against that backdrop, Dartmouth’s decision (which follows a similar move by MIT last year) is a heartening development. Especially amidst rampant high school grade inflation, suspect campus practices, and the flagrant abuse of letters and essays by those who know how the game works, tests like the SAT or ACT can operate as a much-needed reality check. As Dartmouth president Sian Beilock explained in an email to the campus community, the decision reflected a faculty study which concluded that “standardized test scores are an important predictor of a student’s success in Dartmouth’s curriculum” whatever the “student’s background or family income.”
As Dartmouth president Sian Beilock explained in an email to the campus community, the decision ... [+]
Dartmouth economics professor Bruce Sacerdote, who helped lead the faculty study, explained, “We’re getting more and more applications from all around the world, and so in order to find high achieving students, test scores turn out to be a really helpful tool.” He said, “Our analysis shows that we potentially miss out on some great applicants when we don’t have [test scores].”
Whatever qualms activists may have about admissions tests, that kind of arm’s-length gauge is a crucial component of any merit-based, fair-minded admissions system. Heck, as I’ve noted before, last year a survey of four-year college students found that more than 60 percent said they’d lied on their applications about things like their race, high school activities, and personal experiences.
Indeed, contrary to the claims of anti-testing ideologues, Harvard University’s Raj Chetty has reported that selective colleges that embrace admissions testing are more likely to enroll low-income students than those which rely on grades, interviews, essays, and other similar inputs. This really shouldn’t be too surprising, given that it’s affluent, highly-educated parents who are best positioned to enroll their kids in resume-bolstering programs, intensively “edit” their application essays, hire college consultants, write big checks, and leverage legacy admissions or professional networks.
Admissions tests like the SAT and ACT offer an independent snapshot of college readiness and academic preparation. Without admissions tests to put grades into context, colleges can have a harder time keeping an eye on schools, which may hand out high grades or play transcript games in order to help their students get into college. Tests like the SAT and ACT can help level the playing field by providing a check on such machinations.
While those seeking to ditch the SAT and ACT insist that these tests are unfair and unequitable, they’d do well to consider the alternatives. Indeed, the SAT was devised precisely because the test-free world was anything but fair.
As Columbia University’s Nick Lemann explained in “The Big Test,” a century ago, Ivy League students were admitted less on the basis of academic ability than for possessing “money and the right background." That state of affairs prompted Harvard’s reform-minded president James Conant to propose a standardized assessment that would help admit students based on academic merit rather than connections.
The result was the SAT and a dramatic blow on behalf of access and opportunity. As McGill historian Gil Troy has noted, the SAT “mock[ed]” supposed “biological distinctions” and allowed “talented immigrants and minorities [to] breach the elite’s ivy-covered bunkers.” In 1959, Everett Franklin Lindquist, a professor of education at the University of Iowa, developed the ACT to serve a broader range of students and institutions than the SAT.
The SAT and ACT were created to democratize higher education. They still play that role today. Testing helps to level the playing field and ensure that all students, whatever their family connections and wherever they attended high school, have a chance to demonstrate their aptitude and college readiness. Put another way, tests like these serve to promote equity and counter privilege. That’s a message that should resonate today, not just in Hanover, New Hampshire, but on college campuses far and wide.
