The Common App has released a report detailing applicant behavior in the current application cycle through the end of November. Among the data provided are the trends regarding the percentage of colleges and universities requiring scores, and the reporting or non-reporting of test scores by first-year applicants:

[Excerpts]

As reported in the past, the share of Common App members [colleges and universities] requiring standardized test scores has changed dramatically over the past decade — from about 55% in 2019–20 to an all-time low of just 4% in 2023–24. This season, 5% of members require a test score to submit an application.

...the number of applicants reporting a test score continues to grow at a faster pace than the number not reporting a test score, with an 11% increase among reporters, while the number of non-reporters has decreased by 1% since this time during the 2024–25 season. Put differently, 66,037 more applicants reported a test score than applicants who did not by November 1 of the 2024-25 application cycle. This year, that gap has nearly doubled, with 125,404 more applicants reporting test scores than not. It is worth noting that, while applicants reporting test scores have historically outnumbered those who do not early in the season, these trends tend to reverse by season’s end, with a greater share of applicants ultimately not reporting test scores.

Matt note: So far this cycle, 56.5% of first-year Common App applicants have submitted test scores, up from 51.2% two years ago.

 
Swarthmore announced a continuance of its test optional policy that may reach 5 more years.

[Excerpts]

Swarthmore College will continue its test-optional admissions policy for up to five more years. The move aligns the school with many of its peer institutions that chose to de-emphasize SAT and ACT scores amid shifting access, evolving test design, and questions about long-term implications of scores on outcomes.

The decision, confirmed by Dean of Admissions Jim Bock ’90, follows nearly three years of internal analysis and consultation across campus. In a statement to The Phoenix, Bock emphasized that the college’s choice was neither reactive nor symbolic but grounded in “performance and retention data” tracked since the policy was piloted in 2020.

Over this period, Bock, Director of Admissions Isthier Chaudhury and analysts from the Institutional Effectiveness, Research & Assessment (IERA) office met with faculty leadership across divisions and the Summer Scholars Program, along with senior administrators and board members, to evaluate how students admitted without test scores were faring. The findings, according to Bock, show that both test-submitters and non-submitters are “overwhelmingly doing well,” with retention rates remaining high for both groups.

Bock noted that while students who applied without scores have exhibited slightly lower first and second year GPAs on average, this gap was “not worrisome.” IERA also compared outcomes for non-submitters with those of students whose test scores were lower than most applicants’, and found that both groups showed similar academic trajectories.

These analyses, Bock said, strengthen the college’s confidence that “informed [admissions] decisions can be made with or without scores.” Swarthmore remains test optional, not test blind, allowing students to submit SAT and ACT scores at their discretion and continuing to consider AP exam results, IB predicted scores, and country-specific high school leaving or graduation exams when offered.

 
However, a Swarthmore professor has pushed back on the college's announcement, citing the value of standardized testing, especially in an age in which college applicants are increasingly using AI for their schoolwork and their college application essays:

[Excerpts]

Student use of artificial intelligence (AI) in K-12 education and its implications seem like the elephant in the room in The Phoenix’s reporting on the use of SAT/ACT scores in admissions decisions. Evidence suggests that middle and high school students are leaning heavily on generative AI at alarmingly high rates, often to replace complex thinking — to give them ideas for papers, to outline papers, to write the papers, to analyze articles, to do their math and science homework.

...every year going forward, the incoming class will have had even more time leaning on AI to replace actual thinking during their very formative educational years. The administration seems to want to lock this test-optional policy in place for five more years. By that time, we’ll have an entering first-year class that has had access to ever more powerful AI tools since the sixth grade.

What does this have to do with standardized testing? The future looks like one in which there will be a huge number of high school seniors across the country who look great on paper — GPAs close to 4.0, crisply written essays, etc. — who have never read a book cover to cover, never come up with a thesis for a paper or composed one on their own, rarely done their own math homework, and rarely read or analyzed an article without dropping it into an AI assistant first. And then, of course, there will be the huge number of students who also look great on paper and actually have put in the work — coming up with their own ideas, writing their own papers, puzzling through complex and difficult texts, burnishing their critical thinking and analytic skills, and generally doing all the things future students have always done at the high school level that prepare them to succeed at a place like Swarthmore. The fundamental problem is that these two populations will be increasingly difficult to differentiate in the admissions process.

Standardized test scores, despite flaws, are one of the most important data points Swarthmore and other institutions will have to differentiate those populations. Of course, they shouldn’t be leaned on exclusively and instead taken as one data point among many. But they will have huge value because — unlike grades or essays — they cannot be gamed or generated via AI. In my opinion, it is extremely shortsighted for the administration not just to abandon that data point (which it effectively does when test scores are optional, since only high scores are submitted) but to decide to do so for five years, which is an eternity in a world being rapidly transformed by AI.

 
Notre Dame has also reaffirmed its test optional policy, but only for the next admissions cycle:

[Excerpts]

While many universities have reinstated standardized testing as an admissions requirement, Notre Dame has decided to remain test-optional for the next admissions cycle.

The test-optional policy, originally implemented during the COVID pandemic when access to standardized testing was limited, has since become an intentional part of the University’s admissions process. In a statement to The Observer, vice president for undergraduate enrollment Micki Kidder wrote that, even before the pandemic, test scores were just one variable in a holistic admissions process, and that students have thrived both before and after the policy was implemented.

“Notre Dame is also committed to ensuring access for all high-potential young people, and the current policy aligns with our institutional mission by removing financial and logistical barriers for talented students, demonstrating a commitment to comprehensive assessment over reliance on a single score,” Kidder wrote.

 
A report issued by UC San Diego regarding a dramatic drop off in academic skills among freshman enrollees has been receiving a considerable amount of media attention. The UCSD report's authors see the issue as serious enough to require a reassessment of UC's test-blind policy.

[Excerpts from the report follow:]

Over the past five years, UC San Diego has experienced a steep decline in the academic preparation of its entering first-year students -- particularly in mathematics, but also in writing and language skills. Between 2020 and 2025, the number of students whose math skills fall below high school level increased nearly thirtyfold; moreover, 70% of those students fall below middle school levels, reaching roughly one in twelve members of the entering cohort. This deterioration coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects on education, the elimination of standardized testing, grade inflation, and the expansion of admissions from under-resourced high schools. The combination of these factors has produced an incoming class increasingly unprepared for the quantitative and analytical rigor expected at UC San Diego.

The Senate–Administration Working Group on Admissions (SAWG) concludes that this trend poses serious challenges both to student success and to the university’s instructional mission. Admitting large numbers of underprepared students risks harming those students and straining limited instructional resources. The report offers a series of recommendations to improve the alignment between admissions practices, student readiness, and available support system.

UC San Diego’s representative on BOARS should advocate for a systemwide reexamination of standardized testing, as many peer institutions have already done. BOARS should also investigate disparities in high school grading standards and develop a UC-wide response to ensure fair and reliable admissions evaluation.

In this report, we try to identify several factors that may be contributing to this trend; however, regardless of the underlying causes, the problem is serious and demands an immediate institutional response.

Matt notes: That "thirty-fold" increase in unprepared students (those unable to adequately handle high school level math) was from 30 students in 2020 to 900 currently. The new, higher figure of unprepared students represents 1 in 8 enrolled freshmen. Worse still, 1 in 12 cannot even do middle school-level math (about 600 enrollees). Admission to UCSD is still competitive, with a 28% admit rate.

 
The Atlantic has published an article inspired by the UCSD report:

[Excerpts]

For the past several years, America has been using its young people as lab rats in a sweeping, if not exactly thought-out, education experiment. Schools across the country have been lowering standards and removing penalties for failure. The results are coming into focus.

Five years ago, about 30 incoming freshmen at UC San Diego arrived with math skills below high-school level. Now, according to a recent report from UC San Diego faculty and administrators, that number is more than 900—and most of those students don’t fully meet middle-school math standards. Many students struggle with fractions and simple algebra problems. Last year, the university, which admits fewer than 30 percent of undergraduate applicants, launched a remedial-math course that focuses entirely on concepts taught in elementary and middle school. (According to the report, more than 60 percent of students who took the previous version of the course couldn’t divide a fraction by two.) One of the course’s tutors noted that students faced more issues with “logical thinking” than with math facts per se. They didn’t know how to begin solving word problems.

The university’s problems are extreme, but they are not unique. Over the past five years, all of the other University of California campuses, including UC Berkeley and UCLA, have seen the number of first-years who are unprepared for precalculus double or triple. George Mason University, in Virginia, revamped its remedial-math summer program in 2023 after students began arriving at their calculus course unable to do algebra, the math-department chair, Maria Emelianenko, told me.

 
In a similar vein, Illinois recently announced that the high school graduation rate continues to increase, despite a noticeable fall off in SAT/ACT scores.

[Excerpts]

Illinois high school juniors last school year scored lower on the ACT college entrance exam than their peers did a decade ago — mirroring national downward trends in high school achievement.

The average ACT composite score unveiled Thursday for juniors who took the test in the spring was a 18.8 out of a possible 36. Chicago Public Schools reported a 17.1 average composite score, but composite scores for other districts were not released. A decade ago, Illinois juniors posted a 20.5 average composite score and CPS juniors then had an average composite score of 18.2.

Illinois tests juniors on a school day each spring using a college entrance exam, such as the ACT or SAT, to fulfill an accountability mandate outlined in federal law starting in 2002. From 2002 to 2016, Illinois used the ACT, then switched to the SAT, which it used from 2017 to 2024. This past school year, the state returned to using the ACT.

At the same time, Illinois’ four-year high school graduation rate has reached a record high 89%, with Chicago posting an 82.5% rate.

 
Inspired in part by decreasing numbers of high school graduates, more colleges are engaging in "direct admissions" efforts (in which colleges are offering admission to students who haven't applied). This is done via the Common App, and considers high school grades and often test scores. State colleges and universities initiated the direct admissions concepts, but many private colleges are now engaging in the practice, as The Hechinger Report relates:

[Excerpts]

Now private colleges are jumping aboard the direct-admission bandwagon. More than 210 have arranged through the Common App — an online application used by about 1,100 institutions nationwide — to extend offers of direct admission for the coming academic year to students who filed the Common App but have not applied. That’s almost twice as many as signed on last year, when Common App says 119 institutions in 35 states made more than 733,000 unsolicited offers.

It’s still early to definitively know the effect of this on whether students ultimately enroll. In Idaho, which in 2015 became the first state to try direct admission, enrollment of first-time undergraduates at participating public universities rose 11 percent.

Direct admission by itself does not resolve the other reasons students forgo college, however, said James Murphy, director of postsecondary policy at the nonprofit Education Reform Now, which advocates for more access to and diversity in higher education.

“It’s the furthest thing from a panacea,” Murphy said. “How do we know? Because colleges embraced it so quickly. Any reform taken up so quickly by colleges is likely to have more benefit to colleges than to students.”

While direct admission might help colleges get closer to enrollment targets, for example, he said, “it works best when it’s paired with financial aid and other resources that actually make it easier