Dive Brief:
- Columbia University will return to requiring SAT or ACT scores from undergraduate applicants beginning August 2027, the private New York institution said on Friday. The announcement came after Columbia quietly updated its application guidance on June 8.
- The university attributed its decision to "a multi-year faculty review" that found the tests' scores to be "a useful indicator of potential student success."
- Columbia was the last of the Ivy League universities to reinstate standardized testing requirements after the pandemic. It will remain test optional through the upcoming 2026-27 admissions cycle.
Dive Insight:
Columbia, along with hundreds of other colleges across the U.S., went test optional in 2020 as COVID-19 forced common testing sites to shutter. The university adopted the policy temporarily at first before indefinitely extending it in 2023.
However, Columbia has still received hundreds of test scores a year during its test-optional era. Among students enrolled for fall 2024, 44% submitted at least one SAT score when applying and 17% submitted at least one ACT score, according to institutional data.
And even though the university's application guidance said it doesn’t have minimum test score requirements for admission, successful candidates overwhelmingly submit near-perfect scores to the highly selective institution. The median SAT score submitted by the fall 2024 cohort was 1540, and the median ACT score was 35.
Under the new policy, prospective students may request exemptions to the required scores "if personal circumstances such as financial or personal hardship, lack of access to testing locations, or natural disaster or community disruption” prevent them from taking the ACT or the SAT, according to the guidance. It added that applicants who request waivers will not be penalized for doing so.
The news from Columbia comes amid a resurgence in the debate over standardized testing.
The University of California announced Thursday that its academic senate will undertake a "comprehensive, data-driven review" of the system's admissions policies. The selective public system went permanently test optional in 2020 over significant lobbying from testing operators.
But faculty at the University of California have recently pushed the system to reinstate some standardized testing requirements, arguing the institution admitted students who are dramatically underprepared for college-level coursework.
The calls for change began among STEM faculty.
"Over the past five years, we have seen a widening divergence in mathematical preparation levels within the same classroom," an open letter said. The gap has forced some instructors to "reteach middle-school mathematics while simultaneously teaching the material students need for sciences, engineering, economics, and other quantitatively demanding fields."
The letter argued that this trend means the system's "current admissions practices do not provide a sufficiently reliable check on mathematical readiness for STEM majors.”
As of Monday afternoon, over 1,500 instructors have signed the letter, including seven of the system's nine mathematics department heads that oversee undergraduate programs.
Following the STEM-specific calls, some University of California faculty in the humanities and social sciences have also voiced support for a return to standardized testing.
Nearly 500 such faculty signed a second letter endorsing the demands of their STEM colleagues and pushed for "using the verbal reasoning component of SAT/ACT in undergraduate admissions."
"As artificial intelligence becomes more capable, it is arguably more important than ever for students to be able to think through and compose sound arguments on their own, to comprehend the texts they read, and to recognize weaknesses in the arguments of those texts," the second letter said. "The growing use of AI also makes essays a less reliable indicator of these abilities."
The University of California's academic senate intends to share the findings of its admissions review with the system's president and governing board in July.
