Several prestigious colleges and universities around the country are reinstating standardized test requirements for admission, a major change for high school seniors who plan to start applying next fall.

The change comes four years after most schools have transitioned to a test-optional policy amid a lack of testing center availability during the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time, the measure seemed temporary but quickly became standard procedure, even for America’s elite institutions like the Ivy League.

The shift no longer concerned the pandemic but instead a growing belief – often evidenced by institutional research – that standardized tests put low-income students at a disadvantage in the admissions process.

For example, Opportunity Insights, a Harvard-based research group, concluded in a 2023 study that students born into the wealthiest 1% of American families were 13 times more likely to score a 1300 or higher on the SAT in comparison to low-income students.

These staggering figures prompted the majority of prestigious institutions to end the requirement in hopes that it would reduce structural barriers for middle and lower-class students to gain entry into America’s academic institutions.

However, some highly selective colleges, like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Georgetown University, maintained their SAT/ACT requirement after the pandemic, citing it as an important data point for determining a student’s academic potential.

“Just getting straight A’s is not enough information for us to know whether the students are going to succeed or not,” said MIT’s Dean of Undergraduate Admissions Stuart Schmill to The New York Times.

Schmill also expressed doubt that standardized test requirements and heightened class diversity were mutually exclusive. “Once we brought the test requirement back, we admitted the most diverse class that we ever had in our history,” he told the Times.

Now, it seems that similar institutions are adopting a similar mindset.

In February, Dartmouth College announced it would be bringing back the SAT/ACT requirement, which has been the first major domino to fall. In the three months since their announcement, several of its Ivy League counterparts – including Harvard, Yale, Cornell, and Brown – have stated that they would be reinstating similar policies.

The primary reason for the change, according to Dartmouth President Sian Leah Beilock, was that the test-optional policy was inadvertently harming low-income and historically disadvantaged applicants.

“Crucially, though, the research shows that standardized test scores can be an important predictor of academic success at a place like Dartmouth and beyond… and with a test-optional policy, prompted by the pandemic, we were unintentionally overlooking applicants from less-resourced backgrounds who could thrive here,” she wrote in an official statement on the decision.

Test-optional policies, school officials are saying, were prompting students to not submit scores that, in the context of their circumstances, may have been an asset to their application. The result was a strong selection bias that placed the middle 50% of admitted SAT scores in the high 1500s, which was misleadingly high and discouraged applicants who were otherwise qualified.

Prestigious universities are expressing confidence that they will be able to evaluate test scores in the broader context of an applicant’s upbringing, much like they do in regards to coursework and extracurriculars.

Admissions officers are also expressing hope that bringing back required tests will restore clarity to the admissions process, which has become increasingly unpredictable amid record-highs in application numbers.

Still, the change is yet another upheaval for college admissions, which has been thrust into the spotlight following the Supreme Court’s polarizing decision last summer to end the consideration of race in admissions processes, a move that subsequently renewed opposition to legacy admissions practices.

It will likely take years of data to determine the impact of the return of the SAT and ACT, but elite colleges seem increasingly aligned in their thinking that standardized tests are necessary for a fairer and more equitable process.