Test-optional always sounded a little too good to be true. Turns out, it was.
One by one, every Ivy has quietly backed away from test-optional. Starting Fall 2027, Columbia, the last holdout, is bringing back the SAT/ACT requirement for all students. That’s it. The Ivy League’s test-optional experiment is officially over.
And where the Ivies go, everyone else tends to follow. MIT and Stanford are back to requiring scores, as are plenty of big state schools: Purdue, UT Austin, University of Florida, and the University of Georgia. This isn’t just an elite-school-thing.
So what happened?
Columbia looked at its own data and landed on a pretty simple conclusion: test scores actually predict how kids do once they’re on campus. Yale said the same thing, more bluntly. Their admissions dean called test scores “the single greatest predictor of performance in Yale courses.”
The biggest challenge colleges face today is figuring out how students are really performing academically. And what’s getting in the way of that is grade inflation, which has been creeping up for years, and the pandemic only made it worse. Additionally, every high school teaches, grades, weights, and curves differently, not to mention all the extra credit opportunities. Two students can both have a 4.0 but have had completely different academic experiences. Transcripts just aren’t apples to apples anymore.
So, love them or hate them, and most hate them, the SAT and ACT are still the one thing every applicant takes under the same conditions. Right now, that’s about all schools have got.
Does this mean test scores are everything? No. Admissions was never about one number. But in a world where a 4.0 doesn’t mean what it used to, a strong score is once again the clearest way for a student to stand out.