Students applying to Yale University will now be required submit their standardized test scores beginning in the Fall of 2025, which is a considerable switch from the current application format that doesn’t identify exam performances as a necessity.
This makes the Connecticut college the second Ivy League to abandon test-optional policies that had been widely accepted since the Covid pandemic.
Though Yale officials also stated that its reinstated policy would be “test flexible” and permit students to submit scores from subject-based Advancement Placement or International Baccalaureate tests, rather than exclusively accepting SAT or ACT scores.
In an announcement on Thursday, faculty from the university said the shift to test-optional policies might have unwittingly held back students from low-income families whose test scores could have helped their chances of being admitted.
However, Yale’s decision remains one that is in the minority, as many universities have decided to keep their optional exam conditions in the aftermath of the pandemic.
More than 80 percent of four-year colleges, or at least 1,825 of the country’s bachelor-degree-granting institutions, will not require SAT or ACT scores this fall, as reported by the organization Fair Test, which fights against standardized testing.
As of 2022, the number of students taking the SAT dropped to 1.7 million from 2.2 million in 2020.
The anti-testing movement has long argued that standardized tests perpetuate inequality as many students from high-income families can afford tutors and other forms of extracurricular help to obtain a higher score while other cannot. Particularly after the Supreme Court’s decision last year that restricted race-conscious admissions, test-optional policies have become more common.
Yet, some recent research has questioned the idea of whether these flexible policies may actually harm the disadvantaged students they’re meant to help.
A group of economists at Harvard called Opportunity Insights published a study in January that found test scores could help identify lower-income students and underrepresented applicants with high academic scores in the application process.
Jeremiah Quinlan, the dean of undergraduate admission at Yale, claimed in a written statement released by the university that the Ivy League had determined that test scores, while imperfect, were predictive of academic success in higher education.
Yale’s decision, which won’t affect students who applied during the current admissions cycle, followed a similar switch made in February by Dartmouth College, along with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which announced that it was reinstating its testing requirement in 2022.
