New Delhi: Brown University is the third Ivy League school to reintroduce the requirement of standardised testing scores for undergraduate admissions from fall 2025. The university announced its decision Tuesday.
Dartmouth College announced its decision to reinstate standardised testing last month, followed by Yale University a few weeks later. These three are the first Ivy League universities to abandon the test-optional policies first introduced at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
Before the pandemic, most US universities required students to submit either the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) or the American College Testing (ACT) standardised test scores during admissions.
The reinstatement of standardised testing at Brown University came after university president Christina H. Paxson appointed an ad-hoc committee in September 2023 to evaluate the undergraduate admissions policies. The university went public with an executive summary of the report the committee submitted earlier Tuesday.
“The absence of test scores makes it more difficult to differentiate among the many applicants with strong high school records or to contextualise the performance of a student from a school that has sent relatively few students to Brown and with which the office of college admission is less acquainted,” said the ad-hoc committee in its report.
The report added, “For example, a student with scores that fall below the Brown median but which (scores) are at the very top of the range for their particular school may be a promising candidate for admission; therefore, the lack of test scores removes a piece of evidence that could make a positive difference in the admissions decision.”
In June 2023, Paxton published a piece in the Brown Alumni Magazine, pondering whether to reinstate standardised testing requirements for admissions.
“Careful statistical work by one of Brown’s faculty members shows that students with higher SAT or ACT scores are less likely to encounter academic difficulty at Brown,” wrote Paxson in that piece, highlighting that the matter has been considered for a while by those running the university.
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‘Standardised tests may aid disadvantaged students’
Research by Dartmouth College found that test scores are a better predictor than high school grades or student essays and teacher recommendations of how well a student would perform at the college, according to a report in the New York Times.
“However, strong testing, interpreted in context, may actually serve to demonstrate their ability to succeed at Brown — and the lack of scores may mean that admissions officers hesitate to admit them,” said the Brown report in tune with the Dartmouth College one.
The ad-hoc committee at Brown concluded that standardised testing would expand the access and diversity of its students.
For example, many students who did not share their SAT scores with the Dartmouth admissions committee because they feared their scores were too low could have been accepted into the university because the scores would have been proof of their ability to thrive in a rigorous environment, the New York Times reported.
In a statement published in February, Yale University came up with similar findings, alluding that the lack of a standardised test score with their application might have further harmed disadvantaged students.
A report published by FairTest, an organisation that advocates against standardised testing in American universities, however, argues that tests like the SAT and ACT are an “extraordinarily effective self-validation mechanism for an elitist ‘meritocracy’ to continue to perpetuate itself”.
The FairTest report highlighted that nearly 90 percent of four-year degree colleges and universities across the US follow test-optional policies.
“The adoption of test optional and test free admissions policies by nearly 90% of four-year colleges is a clear financial threat to the College Board (which conducts SAT), ACT, and all others who feed off the admissions testing beast,” said the FairTest report.
(Edited by Madhurita Goswami)