Why US Colleges Are Reviving Standardized Tests

US colleges relied on standardized testing to help with admissions decisions for decades. Then the Covid pandemic hit and test centers closed, making administering the ACT and SAT exams difficult. That prompted many schools, including all eight in the Ivy League, to make the tests optional. Critics of standardized testing had expressed hope that the pause would lead to a permanent rethinking of the exams, whose results have demonstrated disparities between white and nonwhite students. But this year, Ivy schools Yale University, Dartmouth College and Brown University said they were making the tests mandatory again. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced the same move in 2022.

In April, Harvard also said it would reinstate the requirement for high school seniors applying in the fall of 2025. “Fundamentally, we know that talent is universal, but opportunity is not,” Hopi Hoekstra, dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, said in the written statement. “With this change, we hope to strengthen our ability to identify these promising students, and to give Harvard the opportunity to support their development as thinkers and leaders who will contribute to shaping our world.”