Ivy League schools say bringing back SATs will help underrepresented applicants. Some critics are skeptical.

By Jillian Berman

Yale, Dartmouth and now Brown say test-optional policies hurt marginalized groups. The research is mixed.

After a brief hiatus, SATs and ACTs are back in vogue in the Ivy League.

Brown University announced Tuesday that it will once again require students to submit standardized-test scores as part of their applications. The news follows similar announcements from Dartmouth College and Yale University last month.

The moves by the three highly selective, well-known schools have reinvigorated the debate about the role of standardized tests in admissions. For decades, such tests were a typical requirement of selective colleges, despite concerns about the close relationship between test scores and economic background. The last few years, as hundreds of schools stopped requiring them amid the pandemic, provided some vindication to those who opposed the tests.

But now, with Zoom classes and social-distancing protocols mostly in the past, some colleges seem eager to bring the tests back. These schools claim their absence actually harmed applicants from underrepresented groups, but critics are skeptical of that rationale. The debate comes as many colleges say they're looking for ways to maintain racial diversity following the Supreme Court's decision earlier this year to ban the use of affirmative action in admissions.

Nicholas Lemann, the author of the 1999 book "The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy," said he was surprised to see colleges opt to reinstate the tests given the court's decision. Racial gaps in SAT scores have shrunk over the past few decades, but they persist, and some college-access organizations have urged schools to rethink their use of standardized tests in admissions as a way to increase the racial and economic diversity of their classes.

Despite the headline-grabbing announcements, many schools may stick with a test-optional policy.

"The thing about America is it has a very large number of colleges and a very small number of highly selective colleges," Lemann said. "The highly selectives have a big mental footprint on the mind of the country. The question is whether you'll start to see this happening outside this small number of highly selective schools."

Do test-optional policies hurt underrepresented groups?

In reinstating their standardized-testing requirements, some colleges cited findings from internal data that they said indicated the test-optional policy harmed applicants from underrepresented groups. Broadly speaking, historically underrepresented groups in higher education include Black, Latino, Native American and low-income students, as well as first-generation students who are the first in their family to attend college.

The schools' own research comes against a backdrop of findings from Opportunity Insights, a Harvard University organization co-led by economist Raj Chetty that studies barriers to economic mobility. The organization's research found that the tests can provide some useful information about applicants to highly selective schools.

That research indicates that at Ivy Plus colleges - as Ivy League schools along with MIT, Duke University, the University of Chicago and Stanford University are known - standardized-test scores are a good predictor of college success. In fact, they're a much better predictor than high-school grades, which can be inflated, the research found.

"The takeaway is, if a student's academic preparation is an important part of the admissions process, it's very important at Ivy Plus schools to include test scores," said John Friedman, an economics professor at Brown University and one of the authors of the study.

Without the test scores, it can be difficult to evaluate students who come from schools that don't typically send students to highly selective colleges, Friedman said. If admissions officers don't know much about a given high school and it doesn't offer advanced coursework, it can be hard to make sense of a student's transcript.

In addition, students from under-resourced high schools are at a particular disadvantage when it comes to other aspects of the admissions process, like letters of recommendation and extracurricular activities, Opportunity Insights found. High schools that have a tradition of sending large numbers of students to elite colleges often have counselors and teachers trained in writing glowing recommendations. Wealthier students are also more likely to have access to things like private music lessons and certain sports.

For students without these advantages, a test score can provide a valuable signal to admissions officers that they'll succeed at their college, Friedman said. That's true even when the test score is lower than the college's median standardized-test score.

"Using test scores does not eliminate this trade-off between academic preparedness and other factors in admissions, but what it does do is it allows schools to make that trade-off with more information," Friedman said.

Dartmouth, Yale and Brown have all said that the test-optional policy may have caused them to miss out on applicants who didn't submit their scores because they believed they'd be too low for admission. Wealthier students are more likely to have standardized-test scores that are in the typical range for students admitted to these schools: Research from Opportunity Insights and others has found that there's a strong correlation between parental income and test scores.

The schools said that students who may not have had the resources to score as well on the tests but whose score would have indicated to admissions officers that they'd be successful at the school may have been scared off from submitting their score. But without the score, admissions officers had little to go on in evaluating their other materials, they said.

"The mere choice to submit the test score is actually a pretty tricky strategic choice," Friedman said. Whether it makes sense to do it varies quite a bit by applicant and requires a lot of knowledge about how the admissions process works at Ivy Plus schools, he said.

A test-optional policy with more clarity

Some college counselors agree that it can be challenging for students to read the tea leaves of test-optional policies. But there are ways to address this within a test-optional regime, said Chris Bennett, an education research analyst at RTI International, an independent nonprofit research institute. Bennett has studied colleges' approach to standardized tests.

"It's interesting to me when institutions choose the route of requiring test scores to combat confusion rather than keeping the test-optional approach but providing more communication about what that means," he said. "You could imagine an institution could keep test-optional but just be a little more transparent about how much they are considering test scores [and] the circumstances under which test scores can improve someone's chances."

Bennett said he's seen policies at public colleges and private liberal-arts schools that, for example, encourage students to submit their SAT score if it's above a 1200 or if it's above their high school's average.

"That commits them to putting [these policies] in writing. That's not a step that every university is willing to do, because it is a holistic process," he said.

At the University of Michigan, officials decided to keep the test-optional policy in place in part because they thought students would be best suited to make the decision about whether it would benefit them. Michael Bastedo, a professor of education at the school who co-led the committee that recommended keeping the test-optional policy in place, said research indicates that students are similarly strategic in the admissions process regardless of background.

In addition, requiring the tests would mean students with lower scores have to trust that they'll be considered in context in order to be convinced to apply, he said.

"There's just a little bit of a leap of faith there that you have to take that those students are still going to benefit even when they're reporting a lower test score," he said. Five years ago, when Bastedo surveyed admissions offices as part of his research, he found that most were not evaluating students' context as part of their holistic review process.

Bastedo said the committee's thinking was informed in part by Bennett's research. Bennett found that colleges that went test-optional before the pandemic saw a slight increase in the share of low-income students and students from underrepresented backgrounds who enrolled.

Bastedo said he calls the study a Rorschach test for how people view standardized tests. The smallness of the increase indicates to people who support testing that it didn't make a huge difference. For those who oppose testing, they see the results as evidence that going test-optional can be used as a lever to boost enrollment among underrepresented students. "People see in it what they want to see in it," he said.

Another factor in Michigan's decision, according to Bastedo: Students who didn't submit a standardized-test score during the pandemic were doing well at the school.

The Opportunity Insights research indicates that standardized-test scores can be a good predictor of success at Ivy Plus colleges, but that relatively large differences in scores don't result in big differences when it comes to success at college: The researchers found that an extra 100 points on the SAT translates to a 0.1 increase in GPA.

"It can be mathematically true that there are statistical distinctions, but what's the practical significance of that?" Bennett said.

Students who are thriving

That jibes with what Sara Yelich Miller has found. The executive director of Green Halo, an organization that works with students on college access and success, says that when she hears that admissions offices need standardized tests to determine whether a student will do well, "I just roll my eyes."

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