Ivy League Walks Back Removal of Standardize Testing Admission Requirements
Dartmouth College is planning to reinstate its standardized testing requirements for undergraduate admissions after suspending them in 2020 as part of the Ivy League’s COVID-19 response.
Dartmouth announced the decision on Monday, claiming that the policy reversal was “informed by new research” and will go into effect for the 2025 application cycle. The school stated that many students were not able to take standardized tests, like the SAT and ACT, therefore it took a “hiatus” that allowed staff to review “admissions data over several years.”
After reviewing the data, the Ivy League determined that “careful consideration of testing information” benefits the schools’ “holistic admissions approach.” Dartmouth’s president, Sian Leah Beilock, said that “standardized test scores are an important predictor of a student’s success” but claimed that the scores “reflect inequality in society and in educational systems across the nation.”
“For Dartmouth, the evidence supporting our reactivation of a required testing policy is clear. Our bottom line is simple: we believe a standardized testing requirement will improve—not detract from—our ability to bring the most promising and diverse students to our campus,” the university added in the press release announcing the changes.
In a social media post announcing the changes, Dartmouth staff wrote, “We know standardized tests can cause anxiety in the lives of prospective students,” adding, “We hope clarity around our policy and the reasoning behind it lessens this stress.”
According to the Daily Caller, other prestigious universities suspended their standardized testing admission requirements in 2020, including Brown University, Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which later reversed its policy and reactivated its testing requirements in 2022. Columbia University, however, made the policy permanent in March 2023.
Following the pandemic, TPUSA reported that national SAT and ACT scores fell to the lowest average seen in years, and in 2022, only 22% of students who took the ACT met the benchmarks in Math, Reading, Science, and English. The test-optional admissions requirements adopted by numerous universities allowed several students, who would have otherwise been negatively affected by their lower standardized testing scores, to gain admission to colleges around the country.
