Change is on the way regarding college applications for Berkeley High School juniors. Students will now be required to submit standardized test scores to popular universities such as Stanford, Cornell, Purdue, and Harvard along with tens of others starting next year. This is different from recent years, when most U. S. universities have been test optional.
In 2020, many colleges and universities stopped mandating the SAT and ACT in applications, largely due to the inability to administer tests during the COVID-19 pandemic. This led to students who had excellent grades and extracurriculars, but low standardized scores, to suddenly become more competitive at elite universities.
However, starting in the 2025-26 application process, many universities will be switching back to mandating SAT and ACT scores in applications. Stanford University announced that they made this change based on internal research, which found that standardized tests are an important predictor for students’ capabilities in college. However, some students express skepticism at this idea.
“A lot of people don’t perform the way that they potentially can (on the SAT/ACT) by length of intellect, because of this, I don’t think (the test is) an accurate measure of all people and what their capabilities are,” BHS junior Julius Rosenbach said. This change will affect current high school juniors, like BHS junior Nevo Naftalin-Kelman, who pointed out that the switch back to mandating test scores will allow schools to filter out students easier. “They will no longer have to sift through thousands of essays, it narrows the field of how many people are being looked at,” Naftalin-Kelman said.
Naftalin-Kelman also mentioned that SATs and ACTs do not necessarily pick out the smartest students; instead, they identify the best test takers and the people most committed to studying. Even so, he recognized that there are no better options. “At this point, standardized tests are one of the best solutions, I don’t know if there really is a solution that works, because it’s just so hard to measure people’s academic ability with something simple, like (standardized tests),” Naftalin-Kelman said.
BHS junior Sarah Marsh believes that standardized tests should have little importance in the decision making process of college admissions. “I think that more important things are your essays or your extracurriculars. And I’d say even GPA is more important than SAT scores and ACT scores,” Marsh said.
Despite students’ personal perspectives, research suggests that standardized tests may be particularly important to predicting how students will perform in college. A study done by a group called Opportunity Insights found that at Ivy League schools, along with Duke, MIT, University of Chicago, and Stanford, success in college had little to no correlation with students’ GPA. However, there was a strong correlation between collegiate success and standardized test scores. The University of California (UC) system conducted a similar experiment in 2020 and found similar results.
“Test scores have vastly more predictive power than is commonly understood in the popular debate,” John Friedman said, a professor of economics at Brown University, as reported in the New York Times.
Despite this, others still argue that standardized tests create equity issues that limit equal access to education. Alfredo Corrales (Mr. Freddy), a counselor in the CCC explained how students often have to travel in order to take the SAT/ACT, a process that can involve paying for hotels, or car access, both of which are not resources available to all students. In addition, there is a $68 fee to take the test itself, however this can be waived if the student is eligible.
Even though many schools have reinstated standardized tests, options remain for those who choose not to take them. As noted in the Washington Post, as many as 80 percent of undergraduate institutions remain test optional. The UC system also remains test-blind. However, given the ever-changing landscape, BHS students, especially those who plan on applying to highly selective private schools, may need to budget for and develop a study plan to prepare for future testing mandates.