[Podcast] What Colleges Are Test-Optional vs Test-Required?

Sheila Akbar 0:00
These are a lot of hypothetical situations. Of course, a student can’t possibly know exactly how an admissions officer is going to read their score, but this is why it’s important to go to that testing policy page on the website. Hey folks, welcome back. We are in the heart of September and we’re talking about testing. There are a lot of students who are thinking about whether they should submit a test score or not with their college applications. What does test optional even mean? How do I know which schools are requiring test scores and how those policies are changing? So we get into it today. Take a listen.

McKenzie Carver 0:49
The burning question for this week is: which colleges are test optional and which are test required?

Sheila Akbar 0:59
That’s a very practical question. I could sit here and rattle all the names off, but that’s a lot of colleges — that would be a pretty boring episode of this podcast. So I’ll start by just answering that question very directly. There are plenty of websites that will tell you that. Please don’t ask AI. Look at fairtest.org. That is probably the most reliable tracker of test optional and testing policies in general. They’re a nonprofit testing watchdog group that I really trust and respect. You can go on their website and see the history of the test optional movement and the studies that show why test optional is a good thing for colleges and for our society, frankly. They do advocacy around testing — not just for college testing, but K-12 schools, state assessments, graduate assessments. They kind of cover everything around testing and education. So that’s a great website for everybody to bookmark and a great organization to donate to. They’ve got a really comprehensive list of colleges with their test optional, test blind, or test required status, and they keep it very up to date. That’s a resource I trust — so that’s where you should go first.

The second place you should go is, once you’ve built your college list, look at the testing policy explicitly stated on that college’s admissions website. You can always Google the name of the college plus “standardized testing policy” and you’ll get to something within the college’s website domain that is their official policy. That often comes with an explanation as well, which is kind of what I want to pivot into — all right, you found out if they’re test required, test optional, or test blind. What do you do with that information?

It’s probably worth defining those terms. I feel like I’ve defined them to death, but people still don’t always know what they are.

Test required means you need an SAT or ACT score in order to be considered for admission. There are a handful of these — a very small number. Most of the Ivy League schools are requiring tests, and a few others that might surprise you: Ohio State, the Florida public schools. There are some random ones in there. But it’s really a very, very small number of schools.

Then we have test blind or test free — they mean the same thing, just different language depending on who’s using it. These are schools that will not look at a test score. They won’t give you an opportunity to submit one. It doesn’t matter how good or how bad it is — they don’t care. The probably most famous group of schools that are test free right now are the University of California system schools. They’ve been test free for a while. There are some rumblings about bringing it back, and the faculty are advocating for this or the board is reviewing it, but nothing has changed yet. Those schools are still test free. So if you’re planning to apply to the UC schools, you may not even need to take a test — and even if you’ve got a great score, know that you won’t be submitting it there.

And then we have test optional, which is the biggest category — over 90% of colleges in the United States are test optional. These range from not selective at all to the most selective. There are some schools with single-digit admissions rates that are test optional. Test optional means you can decide as the applicant whether you want your score to be considered with your application or not. You can have taken a test and decide not to send it to a particular school. Or maybe you never took a test. There’s a whole chain of decisions that lead to that moment of “do I submit this score or not?” — and I’m sure we have other podcast episodes that cover that. We won’t go down that road right now.

But it is important to know the testing policy for the schools on your list, because then you can make smart decisions: should I take an official SAT or ACT? Should I retake if I’ve already taken it once? Do I need a better score? What score is “good enough” to send?

That’s a very nuanced conversation because it has something to do with the average range of scores for admitted students at a particular school — but it also has to do with what the strengths in your application are and what information a test score is adding to that data set. If you’ve got a really strong GPA, you’re taking all the rigorous classes at your school, and you’re super involved — well, a test score might not add that much. At the same time, if you’re top of your class and taking all the hard classes, maybe you already have a great SAT score, in which case go ahead and send it. But if your GPA is a little inconsistent across the years, or a particular set of classes has always been challenging for you and you happen to do really well on that section of the SAT or ACT — well, maybe that’s information you want to make sure they know. But if your test scores aren’t really aligned with your academic performance, like you’ve got really strong grades but a softer test score, maybe that just raises more questions and isn’t actually helpful.

These are a lot of hypothetical situations. Of course, a student can’t possibly know exactly how an admissions officer is going to read their score — but this is why it’s important to go to that testing policy page on the website.

A great example of this is Yale. They list a lot of information on their testing policy page — not only about why they made the decision to go back to requiring tests, but also historical information about what scores are typical. They were looking at data from before COVID, which is when everybody went test optional. The thing with test optional is that only the strong scores get submitted. So when you look at a school’s average test scores, you’re only looking at the ones that people thought were strong enough to submit. There are still people who get into test optional schools without a test score — and you can see the percentage of people who submitted test scores who ended up enrolling, which is a good indication of that.

I have so many students who are like, “I’m never going to get into X school because their average is 1500.” And it’s like — that’s just the average of the scores that were submitted.

McKenzie Carver 9:29
So if you’re looking at a school’s Common Data Set for the past application cycle and looking at those average scores that were submitted, they might be a little bit inflated compared to what the school will actually consider.

Sheila Akbar 9:42
Yeah. That’s why I really appreciated that Yale was like, “In 2019, our averages were this” — because then it’s like, okay, this is when everybody was submitting scores and this is what was happening. It doesn’t mean that expectations for test scores haven’t gone up — they certainly have. But I just want to put some context around those numbers so people understand what they’re really looking at.

Look at the testing policy page, because it might tell you that a score of, say, 1400 is actually great for them and they want to see anything above a 1400.

McKenzie Carver 10:25
Right.

Sheila Akbar 10:26
We encourage you to submit it. Other schools will say something like, “We’re going to evaluate your test score in light of how other people from your school typically do.” And when they say that, I don’t know that they mean your specific high school. They may have data over the years from people applying from your high school and the scores they submit. But I think it’s more likely they’re saying: from your zip code, your county — they have that aggregated data from the testing company about average scores for different regions, and they’ll look to see if your score is in line with that, above it, or below it. That’s a piece of the information they’ll use when evaluating scores as well.

We also want to remember that the application is much more than just scores. Scores tell a college something about — well, they like to pretend it tells you something about academic ability, but we know it tells more about the wealth of your family, the kind of college-going culture you grew up in, the executive functioning of the student. Can they focus and demonstrate what they know under time pressure? Do they have good recall under pressure? Are they good at understanding the trickiness of a test and not falling into a trap that’s in the answer choices or in the wording of a question? It’s not a measure of intelligence, but it does fall into academic measures when a college is evaluating a student. But they’re looking at far more than just that — who you are in your school, what teachers say about you, what you do outside of school, what you want to study and why you want to do it at their school, whether that’s a priority they’re trying to fill. All sorts of other things more related to values, culture, and engagement than just academic achievement.

So my closing line on this is: you are not your test score. You can still get into a great college for you without a test score. Do your best on it. If this ends up being a strength of yours, great — use it. But if it’s not a natural strength, test optional is a gift. It’s a gift to you. Focus on your other strengths and don’t waste your time on something that’s likely not going to help you in the application process.

One more thing: I do believe that every student can learn to do better on these tests. The question for me is, is it worth their time and energy to do so? For some people the answer is yes. For others, the answer is no. And it may depend on when you finally get around to thinking about it. If you’ve got two months before college application deadlines, it’s not the time to start prepping for the SAT — you’ve got other things you need to do, and prepping is just going to be a distraction. But if you’re in the middle of your sophomore year, or even your junior year right now, and you’re thinking, “Maybe I am pretty good at some of these things and I do have time to fit this in my schedule” — it absolutely might be worth it. But that is the question people should be asking, not “Where can I apply without a test score?”

McKenzie Carver 14:15
I do have a logistical follow-up question about those test optional schools. If you choose to submit your scores, do you send them from the testing agency? Is it self-reported? Do you report them on the Common App?

Sheila Akbar 14:34
Great question. There is a place on the application to report your test scores. But — and of course everything is complicated — this gets nuanced. If you have a college list where you’re going to submit your scores to some schools and not others, because there’s a difference in selectivity, testing policy, or average score, don’t put it on the Common App. You do not have to list your scores on the Common Application. Instead, you can send official scores directly to the school from the College Board website or from the ACT website and they’ll go directly to the school.

There are a lot of colleges that now, because sending scores from the testing agency costs a fee, say self-report your scores. And if you get in, we’ll ask you for official score reports. So you might not always have to submit official score reports upfront — but again, this is why you want to check the testing policy for each school. Are they okay with self-reported scores, or do they want official scores at the time of submission, or can you send those later?

It takes knowing your college list and knowing your strategy around test scores to know whether you should list it on the Common App or not.

McKenzie Carver 16:09
It really is kind of nuanced and complicated.

Sheila Akbar 16:12
It is, and it’s unfair. It’s just unfair. Who’s got time to worry about this? I mean, it’s my job, so I worry about it — but no one else has time for this. We’ve got a world to live in.

McKenzie Carver 16:25
Are there some colleges that care more about individual section scores — like your reading score or your math score — more than the composite?

Sheila Akbar 16:43
I’ll go to the obvious answer: MIT really cares about your math score. Over 90% of people who get into MIT have a perfect score in the math section. It really does tell them something. But it should also show you that just getting a perfect score is not enough to get into MIT — because there are plenty of people with perfect scores who don’t get in. It’s not just the score. In some places it’s table stakes — the price of entry to getting a deeper look. Not that tests are used as a cutoff, but in some places it’s like, “We have our pick of valedictorians and perfect scorers. What’s gonna make the decision?” It’s not the GPA, it’s not the test score.

So if we’re looking at highly technical schools or engineering programs, they’re going to look at the subscores — but not all of them. Selective schools tend to use holistic admissions, so they can decide what’s going to sway their decision. They might choose someone who doesn’t have a perfect score over someone who does because that student with the 1300 has some other talent, is related to a big donor, or is a fourth-generation legacy. It’s not a meritocracy based on scores and grades — it’s just not. I turn every episode into this kind of bummer of a systemic analysis. I am actually quite optimistic and fun to work with.

McKenzie Carver 19:00
The hard side of this is that these are things families and students should know. It’s not up to them.

Sheila Akbar 19:10
It’s not. And I’ll go back to something I’m sure I’ve said before: if it’s not up to you, if they’re going to decide what matters on a case-by-case basis — maybe you should just do what matters to you. But we’ve strayed from the test optional question. What else is there around that that you want to know?

McKenzie Carver 19:43
Do you anticipate more schools will bring back the test requirement in the coming years?

Sheila Akbar 19:52
We had a couple more this year bring it back. It’s likely that a couple more will. But I doubt we’re going to go back to a situation where the majority of schools are test required. The consumer is smarter these days, and there are a lot of problems with testing that more and more people know about. I also think that with the Supreme Court decision banning race-conscious admissions, testing becomes a hurdle to certain types of diversity. While some colleges will say “this is how we find our diamonds in the rough” — without a standard measure, we’d never know about the kid in rural Montana who’s a genius — we do know that the SAT and ACT much more often serve as a gatekeeper to higher education. And when I say lots of kinds of diversity, I don’t just mean racial diversity — I also mean socioeconomic diversity, geographic diversity, political diversity. When you force kids to jump through the same standardized hoop, some kids just don’t do as well. It’s not the right instrument to measure their real strengths. And you lose out on some really wonderful students who could bring all kinds of amazing qualities and accomplishments to your campus. Colleges know that. And I think that’s why test optional has stuck around since COVID. It started in the 80s — it’s not like it was invented during COVID. It was already gaining steam before COVID hit, and then that became the only solution. I think a lot of schools are not going to bring it back.

I’ve seen this going around on LinkedIn and Instagram — a lot of testing “experts” are saying the test is now required everywhere, this is the trend, everybody’s going back to requiring tests. And it’s like — one school said they were changing their policy. That is not a trend. A lot of it is just marketing, right? Test prep companies — this is their business, I understand that. We also do test prep. But I’m like, hey, I’m happy to see it go away if it’s not actually serving students. There are plenty of other things we can do with students that actually do serve them.

Which is interesting, because our test prep business has actually ticked up recently. And here I am saying testing is terrible. But there are a lot of tutoring companies for whom this is the only thing they do, and I understand they need clients. But that’s just not who we are at Signet. I don’t want you to be afraid. I want to turn down the volume on your fear, because it is distracting you from what actually matters. I’m really proud of that as a company — our marketing is never fear-based.

So here’s a word of caution to the consumer: as you’re looking for support, think about whether the marketing you’re seeing is fear-based or not. Because that tells you something about the character of who you’re going to work with.

McKenzie Carver 24:08
Mic drop. I think if students are looking for this answer, I just want to reiterate that the first thing they should do is go to their college list and look at each college’s website.

Sheila Akbar 24:28
I have a feeling they haven’t built their college list yet and they want to build it around the answer to “what’s test optional, what’s test required.” So we can talk about that too, because that’s an interesting cart-before-the-horse situation. How do you build a college list without knowing what your test score might be? How do you know what your test score should be without a college list? The chicken and the egg — you kind of have to do both at the same time.

Just start with a practice test. It doesn’t mean you’re committing to take the test. Go on the College Board website, take a full practice test. Go on the ACT website, take a practice test. There’s an official concordance — you can compare the scores to know which test you should focus on if you’re going to test.

And understand that with dedicated prep, you should expect your SAT score to go up 100 to 200 points. If you’re working with one of our tutors, closer to 300 points. On the ACT, you can expect it to go up two to three points — and if you’re working with one of our tutors, I think it’s five to seven points, which is a very large increase on the ACT.

Then you can use that as a rough guide: okay, if I really commit to this, this is where I’d end up. Is that score where I want to end up? Let me build my college list around that. And the other way around: what are the colleges that really meet my desires for my college experience — what I want to study, who I want to be around, where I want to live, the size of the campus and the faculty-student ratio, all of the things? Find the places that really sing to you and see what their scores look like. Because you will always find a handful of colleges that will meet your needs at different levels of selectivity. We don’t all have to be obsessed with Harvard — but if you like something specific about Harvard, you can find that thing at lots of other schools that don’t have a 3% acceptance rate or don’t require a test. Knowing those preferences is really key, and then you can layer in: can I get that score or not? And make your decision about testing.

It’s a process — and that’s why we always say start thinking about this at the end of sophomore year, so you have time to figure it all out, plan, prep, take the test two or three times if you’re going to test, decide where you’re going to submit your scores, and still have time to write all your essays. And of course, go through junior year, which is your hardest year of high school yet. Good luck, godspeed. It’s really hard.

McKenzie Carver 27:55
You just answered my last question, which was when should all of this be happening for students. So they should start thinking about it at the end of sophomore year and then make their testing plan in junior year fall?

Sheila Akbar 28:07
Sophomore summer — make the testing plan. Take the practice tests and understand what they mean for you. And at the same time, start building your college list into junior fall so that you can then prep and practice.

We have a lot of students who end up prepping the summer after sophomore year. They get their testing done right around now. We had a bunch of students take the August SAT, they’re going to take the September SAT, they’re taking the September 19th ACT. I’ve got four students of my own that I’m just herding along — we’ve got 10 more days.

The goal of that is that they’re done with testing before the school year gets really demanding. That’s the ideal world. I know we’re having this conversation in September — that question is coming up for people. They’re probably juniors, maybe even seniors, asking this question. So don’t feel bad if you’re not on the ideal timeline. But just know that you’ve got a lot of decisions to make about this. And if it is your senior year and you’re just starting to think about this, I would strongly recommend you focus on test optional schools or regular decision schools — your deadline isn’t until the beginning of January, so you have a little time to do this and also prepare your applications.