The SATS Are making a Comeback

This week, both Yale and Brown have decided to return to pre-pandemic policies requiring all applicants to submit standardized test scores.

Lots of experts (and quite a few non-experts as well) have strong opinions about standardized test scores in relation to issues of race and class, and whether standardized tests help or hurt low income students in college admissions.  Over the last few years, however, I’ve been thinking about this from a slightly different point of view.

In my opinion, even relatively high-scoring kids from middle class backgrounds have been poorly served by ‘test optional’ policies.  

Consider this: if you score 1400 on the SATs, you are in the top 5% of all test-takers.  This is a score that identifies a student as capable of college work and someone who could thrive at any school in the US.  Yet in the last few years I’ve known three different students who refused to submit SAT scores that were considerably higher than 1400.

Why?  Because colleges report their average test scores, and the average test score has soared in the last five years, thanks specifically to test-optional policies.  In 2018, the overall average SAT score of Harvard freshmen, for example, was 1450.  By 2023, it was 100 points higher.

It’s easy to trace what happened.  No one wants to be ‘below average’ – even if your ‘below average’ score is higher than 95% of test takers.  As soon as Harvard made standardized tests optional, most students who had less than that 1450 average chose not to submit their scores at all.  What do you think happened to the test scores?  Obviously, they spiked upward.  The next year, if Harvard reports its average score is now 1490, no one with scores below 1490 is going to submit, not even the person with the 1480 who would have been perfectly happy to submit just the year before.  

The score itself and its meaning hadn’t changed.  A score of 1400 still placed a student in the top 5-7% of everyone who took the SATs.  Colleges continued to know that a score of 1400 was a damn good score.  But if you don’t submit it, they don’t know that you earned that score.  A valuable piece of information that could have helped you was missing from your application.  

Many schools are still test-optional.  My advice is this: before deciding not to submit your test scores, research the average test scores for the incoming class in 2018 or 2019, before the pandemic.  If your scores are in-line with that, then submit them.