Make ACT and SAT scores optional — not mandatory — in college admissions

If you’re a rising high school senior gearing up for the grueling college application process this fall, you might well breathe a sigh of relief at this recent news:

Your odds of sidestepping the 4-hour-long ACT or SAT are better than 50-50.

More than half of all U.S. colleges and universities have now dropped the requirement that students submit ACT or SAT scores when applying for fall 2021 admission, according to the National Center for Fair & Open Testing.

Among the latest: the University of Illinois at Chicago and in Springfield last Thursday, and Northwestern University a little over a week ago.

In reality, schools right now don’t have much choice. The College Board already has cancelled testing dates across the country because of COVID-19, and “you can’t require a test that students don’t have access to,” as Kevin Browne, UIC’s vice provost of academic affairs, told us.

Greater fairness

But there’s ample evidence that this is a welcome trend, bringing more fairness to the process for students from widely different backgrounds, all the same. College and universities should make this temporary move permanent.

As it is, dozens of institutions, including the University of Chicago, already in recent years have simply scrapped the requirement that prospective students submit ACT or SAT scores — though students are free to submit them if they choose.

As the best research has shown time and again, scores on standardized exams are far from reliable measures of academic ability. Test scores can be skewed, heavily, by social factors such as family income and a parent’s education level — factors that have nothing to do with the academic potential of an eager student, at the college level or any other level.

Say your family can afford to set you up with a high-priced SAT tutor or expensive group coaching. Your test scores almost certainly will be a good deal higher than those of your less well-off — but equally academically gifted — classmate.

When the average cost of one-on-one SAT tutoring is $70 an hour and group classes cost $1,000 and up — who’s going to get that college letter of acceptance when admissions are based on standardized tests?

The kid whose parents have deep pockets, not the kid whose dad drives a bus.

Grades matter most

The most reliable predictor of a young person’s success in college is not a standardized test score. It’s high school grades. Time and again, the research has shown that the best way to know if a kid can cut it in college is to look at how well he or she cut it in high school.

“What a student does over four years,” Browne said, “is more predictive of what they’re capable of than what they did in four hours in testing.”

A groundbreaking January 2020 study from the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research makes the point crystal clear. The study, based on the tracking of more than 55,000 Chicago Public Schools students, found that high school grade point averages outweighed — by a whopping multiple of five — ACT scores in predicting who would graduate from college.

There was, in fact, no strong correlation between ACT scores and finishing college.

“While people often think the value of GPAs is inconsistent across high schools, and that standardized test scores, like the ACT, are neutral indicators of college readiness because they are taken by everyone under the same conditions, our findings indicate otherwise,” the Consortium Director Elaine Allensworth said when the study was released.

“The bottom line is that high school grades are powerful tools for gauging students’ readiness for college, regardless of which high school a student attends, while ACT scores are not,” she said.

A high ACT score might measure what you have learned, even if somebody had to drum it into you. A high grade point average measures a commitment to learning.

Great social equity

When college admissions officers put the emphasis on such factors as grades, teacher recommendations and extracurricular activities, they are taking a step toward greater social equity. After the University of Chicago went “test optional” in 2018 — and increased its financial aid packages — more first generation and low income students applied and were accepted.

We still believe students should be able to submit standardized test scores if they choose to. There’s something to be said for acing a 4-hour, high-stakes exam under pressure.

But what matters most, far and away, is that four years of work in high school.

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