Penn Reinstates Standardized Testing
Credit: Michelle Gustafson / Bloomberg / Getty Images- The University of Pennsylvania will require the SAT or ACT beginning next fall.
- Like many universities, Penn has been test-optional since the pandemic.
- Several elite colleges have reinstated testing requirements recently, citing student diversity as an intended outcome.
- The U.S. Supreme Court’s ban on race-conscious admissions complicates the relationship between testing and diversity goals.
The University of Pennsylvania is the latest highly selective school to return to standardized testing.
On Feb. 14, Penn announced that beginning with the 2025-26 admissions cycle, all undergraduate applicants will be required to submit the SAT or ACT. Students who “face hardships” trying to access testing can submit a waiver with their application.
Like many other universities, Penn went test-optional after the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March 2020. Since then, applications to the university, as with similar institutions, have surged. Last year, Penn received its highest-ever number of applications; more than 65,000 students applied, compared to just under 45,000 in the 2019-2020 cycle, just before Penn went test-optional.
Facing one less hurdle — achieving a high SAT or ACT score — more students are applying to selective colleges. At Penn, the average combined SAT score is 1550, the 99th percentile, which helps explain why last year only 51% of applicants submitted scores.
And only 19% of students submitted their ACT results.
Of course, it’s certainly possible that students scoring high on these tests are more likely to submit scores in the first place, which would drive up averages.
Now all this becomes moot in light of the university’s decision to reinstitute testing. In doing so, Penn hopes to bring “clarity and transparency to the application process,” the announcement says.
“By returning to a testing requirement,” it states, “Penn aims to remove uncertainty for applicants trying to decide whether to include their test scores.”
What this announcement doesn’t do is convey a more egalitarian rationale employed by many other elite schools.
When Dartmouth College in February 2024 became the first Ivy League school to reinstate standardized testing, it cited an internal study indicating that SAT and ACT scores, even those whose scores fall below the college’s median, can help flag high-achieving applicants from middle- and low-income backgrounds — the “diamond in the rough” phenomenon.
Shortly thereafter, Yale University followed suit with a “text-flexible” policy, arguing that standardized tests can actually bolster diversity, not hinder it, by enabling students from under-resourced backgrounds to demonstrate their academic potential.
Brown University soon hopped aboard the testing bandwagon, offering the same reasoning, though Harvard University’s announcement a month later, while certainly symbolic, didn’t venture down that path.
Two years before Dartmouth issued its announcement, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) made news by becoming the first elite college to return to testing. The university said its policy change promotes opportunity and inclusion and isn’t simply a tool for weeding out applicants who fall short of their lofty quantitative standards.
“Our research shows standardized tests help us better assess the academic preparedness of all applicants, and also help us identify socioeconomically disadvantaged students who lack access to advanced coursework or other enrichment opportunities that would otherwise demonstrate their readiness for MIT,” the university wrote in a statement.
“We believe a requirement is more equitable and transparent than a test-optional policy.”
A 2024 study from Opportunity Insights, a research group based at Harvard, corroborated MIT’s findings, determining that standardized test scores have more “predictive power” for academic success in college than high school grade point averages do, particularly at highly selective institutions.
Using admissions records and first-year grades from several “Ivy-Plus” colleges between 2017 and 2022, the group determined that keeping all other variables equal, students who scored highest on the SAT and ACT earned college GPAs 0.43 points higher than those with more modest scores.
By contrast, the study noted, high school GPAs do “little to predict academic success in college.” Perhaps that’s due in part to the rampant grade inflation that’s been plaguing schools over the past decade.
At the same time, the study’s authors didn’t dismiss the advantages wealthier students have when it comes to standardized testing.
“It is important to acknowledge that students from low-income families and other less advantaged backgrounds have lower standardized test scores and are less likely to take the test than students from higher-income families,” the study noted.
“This fact is consistent with those presented above because of disparities experienced throughout childhood, including differences in school quality, neighborhood exposure, and many other environmental conditions.”
Penn’s announcement reflects none of this, instead touting increased clarity and transparency — this from an institution that since 2022 hasn’t reported acceptance rates, though such information is eventually available through the Common Data Set.
Yet Penn’s decision continues the steady march of selective institutions reembracing standardized tests. Among the Ivies, Princeton University, Cornell University, and Columbia University remain test-optional, with Columbia promising to remain forever so. Cornell has reinstated its requirement beginning with the fall 2025 cycle.
And among other Ivy-Plus schools, only Duke University and the University of Chicago remain test-optional. Johns Hopkins University resumed testing last year.
What effect will the return to testing have on student diversity? Data suggests test-optional policies can lead to increased representation among people of color and low-income students, so the reinstatement of testing in the name of greater diversity seems counterintuitive.
That relationship has been compromised by the U.S. Supreme Court’s ban on race-conscious admissions, which has already eroded diversity on many selective campuses. Considering test scores in context can no longer include race as part of that context.
It’s still too early to see how this changing landscape, further complicated by new edicts from the Trump administration, will affect student bodies across higher education and particularly at selective colleges. For students, college admissions remains a rapidly moving target.