Harvard Reinstates the SAT for Admissions

Harvard has finally changed course and reinstated standardized testing for admissions after several other Ivy League schools led the way.

Students applying to enter Harvard in fall 2025 and beyond will be required to submit SAT or ACT scores, though the university said a few other test scores will be accepted in “exceptional cases,” including Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate tests. The university had previously said it was going to keep its test-optional policy through the entering class of fall 2026…

In explaining its decision to accelerate the return to testing, Harvard cited a study by Opportunity Insights, which found that test scores were a better predictor of academic success in college than high school grades and that they can help admissions officers identify highly talented students from low income groups who might otherwise had gone unnoticed.

The Opportunity Insights research was carried out by two Harvard professors.

In announcing its decision Thursday, university officials cited research by Harvard professors Raj Chetty and David J. Deming, and co-author John N. Friedman of Brown University, who used data from hundreds of universities and more than 3 million undergraduate students per year to explore socioeconomic diversity and admissions.

“Critics correctly note that standardized tests are not an unbiased measure of students’ qualifications, as students from higher-income families often have greater access to test prep and other resources,” Chetty said in a statement Thursday. “But the data reveal that other measures — recommendation letters, extracurriculars, essays — are even more prone to such biases. Considering standardized test scores is likely to make the admissions process at Harvard more meritocratic while increasing socioeconomic diversity.”

The decision announced today was actually a reversal as the school had previously said standardized tests would not be required for 2025 applicants.

Harvard College will reinstate its standardized testing requirement in admissions beginning with the Class of 2029, a surprise reversal that could leave some students scrambling to take SAT or ACT tests ahead of application deadlines in the fall…

Harvard had faced mounting criticism from both academics and admissions experts for continuing its test-optional policies, even as its peer institutions returned to requiring standardized tests. In recent weeks, Yale, Dartmouth, and Brown have announced returns to required testing.

The NY Times points out that Harvard has been through a difficult time lately and this decision may be seen as a “return to tradition”

Last June, the Supreme Court struck down race-conscious college admissions in cases involving Harvard and the University of North Carolina, raising fears that with the demise of affirmative action, those schools would become less diverse…

In the current climate on campus, a return to test scores could be seen as a return to tradition. It also may address concerns of many parents that the college admissions process, especially in elite institutions, is inscrutable and disconnected from merit.

The admissions process is inscrutable and disconnected from merit. Very clearly that disconnect is on purpose. As Matt Yglesias pointed out last year, the goal of dropping standardized testing was, in part, to make it easier to get away with abandoning merit in favor of equity.

This is so obvious that it’s not worth beating around the bush: the schools leading the push toward de-testing are not making some kind of blunder, they are trying to get away with something. I’m fond of Talleyrand’s old quip “it’s worse than a crime, it’s a mistake,” but in this case, it’s a crime. SAT scores make it inconveniently easy to demonstrate anti-Asian discrimination in college admissions, so the industry is moving to burn the evidence.

But the schools soon realized that without the tests they were admitting too many students who struggled with the workload. One school after another has found the tests work better than anything else at predicting college success and no one really believed they were racist anyway. The only evidence for that is the fact that an achievement gap exists.

Harvard now joins Brown, Yale, Dartmouth, MIT and other top schools that have reinstated the SAT and ACT. But as I’ve pointed out before, whether the bulk of schools follow suit matters less because most US colleges simply are not that competitive. 

Last year the NY Times published this helpful graphic which shows there are actually very few schools whose acceptance rate is lower than 25%. All together, those roughly 60 schools only accept 6% of America’s college students. When you add in the schools with an acceptance rate between 25% and 50% you add in another 90 or so schools but only another 10% of the total number of college students. To sum up, the top 150 or so most competitive schools accept about 16% of US students. All of the rest of America’s college students go to schools that accept the majority of applicants. Here’s a version of the graphic.

Love this graphic from the @nytimes No disrespect to highly selective colleges and universities but they only represent a small portion of the market while receiving most of the attention. pic.twitter.com/Zz5dBlhZM3

— William Faust (@williamfaust) July 3, 2023

The most exclusive schools should base their acceptance of a relatively small fraction of students who apply on merit. For the schools who accept the majority of applicants anyway, testing is less important.