The decision to move away from using standardized test scores in college applications will go down as one of the greatest follies in the history of higher education, and institutions are waking up to it.
For decades the SAT or the ACT was a nonnegotiable part of the college application process. But that all changed in 2020 when COVID canceled tests and colleges decided to move to a test-optional admissions process.
But as the pandemic receded, many institutions, including elite schools such as Harvard, Yale, and MIT, chose not to return to the old model of admissions and continued to operate on a test-optional admissions model. The reason? University leadership bought activist arguments that standardized tests are racist because, on average, certain demographics tend to do better on the SAT and ACT than others.
Instead, these institutions opted to use grade-point average as the sole…
