The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) said Monday that it will once again require students to submit SAT or ACT results for future admissions. Many colleges abolished standardized test requirements for incoming students or made reporting them optional, like MIT, during the onset of the pandemic.
The temporary modification was intended to alleviate some of the unprecedented stress and challenges that students graduating from US high schools in 2020, 2021, and 2022 would face. The College Board, which administers the SAT, announced in 2020 that COVID-19 restrictions prevented millions of students from taking the test as scheduled in the spring of 2020. It requested that schools and universities be more flexible in their admissions procedures. The ACT admissions test is administered by a non-profit organization.
However, MIT Dean of Admissions and Student Financial Services Stu Schmill noted in a new blog post that having access to the students’ test results improves the university’s assessment of prospective students.
It’s unclear how many other colleges will follow MIT’s lead and reintroduce standardized testing requirements. More than 1,800 schools made standardized test scores an optional aspect of their admissions process for the high school class of 2022, according to the nonprofit education organization FairTest.
In other respects, the College Board has attempted to make the SAT more practical. The organization said in January that it will phase out traditional pencil and paper exams in favor of all-digital exams beginning in 2024 in the United States and 2023 in other countries. The test will be administered at testing facilities, and the time allotted for it will be decreased from three to two hours.
