This Valentine’s Day, Penn Admissions delivered the ultimate love letter to future applicants: a statement announcing a return to standardized testing requirements.
While it may be a tough pill to swallow, the SAT and ACT — for all of their flaws — are invaluable tools in the college admissions process. Doing away with the test-optional policy is ultimately a win-win for the Penn admissions team and the applicant pool it reviews.
Penn’s statement centered the decision around the idea that a testing requirement removes “uncertainty for applicants” suffering from the mental gymnastics of deciding what score is worth submitting. Everyone who’s applied to college in the last few years can recall agonizing over which scores to send to which schools. As high schoolers navigate an already stressful process, test-optional admissions add on an extra load of angst.
Much of this anxiety stems from the fact that test-optional policies have created unrealistic and unhealthy expectations, as applicants aim to submit scores that fall well within the top admissions percentiles. In 2019, prior to a test-optional policy, Penn’s median SAT score was 1505; by 2023, that number jumped 45 points to 1550. As these scores keep climbing, applicants lose sight of what truly matters. Students began ditching their real passions to obsess over testing and retesting and retesting again, all for a few extra points.
A return to test-mandatory policies is a return to testing sanity. Students will have one less burdensome decision to make, and as the data will show, they will finally be able to breathe knowing a 1600 isn’t the only ticket to an acceptance letter from Penn.
On the other side of things, Penn’s admissions officers will benefit from having an objective data point that is proven to be the strongest predictor of success in college and beyond. Without test scores, the only number admissions officers can use to measure academic success is high school GPA. That’s a pretty flimsy metric, especially in a world where standards vary wildly across the world, and almost every top applicant has near-perfect grades. In fact, students with a high school 4.0 go on to have a college GPA only 0.1 points higher, on average, than those applying with a 3.2.
Now let’s compare that to SAT and ACT scores; students with a 1600 or 36 earn a first year GPA that is, on average, 0.43 points higher than those with a 1200 or 25. Moreover, higher standardized testing scores are strongly correlated with success after college, whether that be attending an elite graduate school or working for a prestigious firm.
Of course, graduating summa cum laude or landing a return offer from McKinsey are not the only indicators of a successful undergraduate experience. But, they do illustrate a broader point: Standardized testing scores provide meaningful insight into a student’s potential for academic and professional achievement. In Penn’s admissions process that is clouded by subjectivity, an SAT and ACT score shines as the only objective benchmark — a game-changer in the quest for consistency in an ultra-competitive and highly opaque system.
Even more importantly, the SAT and ACT’s greatest potentials lie in their ability to uplift disadvantaged Penn applicants. Yes, it’s true that low-income test takers, on average, score lower than their wealthier counterparts. But don’t you think that Penn’s highly experienced admissions team is aware of that fact? Those working in selective admissions understand that test scores reflect societal inequalities, as affluent students often have access to test prep and private tutoring that can dramatically boost their scores. That’s why they also recognize that a modest-income, public high schooler from rural Oklahoma who scores a 1400 is far more impressive than the wealthy Trinity student from the Upper East Side with a 1580.
As has been conceded by Brown University, Cornell University, Harvard University, Yale University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and other elite schools, SAT and ACT scores can help admissions officers identify under-resourced students with immense potential. Under Penn’s former test-optional policy, many of these students likely opted not to submit scores below the median — yet, in reality, doing so could have meaningfully improved their chances for admission. Having a test-mandatory policy will take this chance out of the question.
Standardized testing is easy to hate. Naturally, we reject the idea that our “academic potential” can be summed up in a single number — and it’s true that for all their predictive value, the SAT and ACT certainly do not show the whole picture. But they’re not supposed to. Test scores are one valuable number amongst 2,500 words from each Penn applicant and their teachers that help admissions officers understand their background, their passions, and their aspirations. In that light, the end of test-optional isn’t a radical overhaul of Penn’s admissions process but a rational step toward clarity and fairness. For that reason, going test-mandatory is a win.
JESSE VAN DOREN is a College first year studying political science and earth and environmental science from Baltimore. His email is jessevd@sas.upenn.edu.
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