SAT and ACT May Never Regain Their Role in College Admissions
A growing list of schools are dropping the requirement for test scores, even beyond the current chaos.
Coronavirus has shattered the spring rituals of college admissions this year, with tours canceled and standardized testing dates scratched off the calendar. The campus tours will resume someday, and the SAT and the ACT will be administered again – but the stakes of those once-feared exams may be lower.
Almost 200 schools – including some of the most selective, such as Amherst and Williams colleges and Ivy League member Cornell University – have scrapped the requirement for standardized test scores at least for current high school juniors, acknowledging the chaos of lockdowns. Last week, the mammoth University of California system, one of the largest in the U.S. with almost 300,000 students, said it would suspend its testing requirement until at least 2024.