Time to sharpen those No. 2 pencils: After a four-year pause, Yale University is again requiring prospective students to submit standardized test scores in their admission applications.
Unlike in years past, however, the new “test-flexible” policy allows high schoolers a bit more flexibility. In addition to their ACT and SAT results, students can now report Advance Placement (AP) and International Baccalaureate (IB) scores to satisfy the requirement.
Undergraduate admissions dean Jeremiah Quinlan told YaleNews he believes the new policy will help applicants from schools with fewer resources better demonstrate their academic abilities.
When Yale didn’t require test results, he said, students with more resources had an easier time showing their academic prowess in other ways, like extracurricular activities and advanced courses.
“Our research strongly suggests that requiring scores of all applicants serves to benefit and not disadvantage students from under-resourced backgrounds,” said Quinlan.
The school hopes that by doubling the number of tests that fulfill its new requirements, students will have an easier time meeting them.
“During our four years of considering roughly half of our applicants without ACT or SAT scores, we found that subject-based exams such as AP and IB can add valuable evidence to our committee discussions, just as ACT and SAT do,” said Quinlan.
“We do not want to disadvantage or disqualify applicants who have not had the ACT or SAT as part of their planning for college.”
Dartmouth College also recently brought back its standardized testing requirement, citing an internal study that found test scores help better identify “high-achieving applicants from low and middle-income backgrounds.”
Nearly 2,000 higher education schools currently have test-optional admissions policies, according to FairTest, a nonprofit advocacy group that opposes the use of standardized tests as a mandatory admissions requirement.
Standardized tests like the ACT and SAT are “a more accurate measure of a test-taker’s family background than of an applicant’s capacity to do college level work,” Robert Schaeffer, FairTest’s Public Education Director said of the SAT in 2019, before widespread testing was disrupted by the pandemic. “Whether broken down by test-takers’ race, parental education or household income, average SAT scores of students from historically disenfranchised groups fell further behind their classmates from more privileged families.”