The incoming administration's Department of Education has recently sent letters to US colleges and universities warning that they must abide by the Supreme Court's decision that outlawed race-based admissions decisions. According to some educators, the language in the letters suggests that the DOE might investigate colleges that do not require SAT/ACT scores, as such a test optional or test blind policy might be viewed as part of an effort to circumvent the Supreme Court decision and stealthily continue to make admissions decisions on the basis of ethnicity. Federal funding of colleges might be used as leverage to gain compliance.

Forbes has published an article examining the issue:

[Excerpts]

Last week the U.S. Department of Education issued a “Dear Colleague” letter that warned colleges and universities they could lose federal funding if they considered race in any of a broad range of campus and student policies.

The Department indicated it will begin assessing compliance starting no later than 14 days from issuance of the letter, adding that institutions failing to comply with its order may face an investigation.

The letter took an expansive and controversial view of federal civil rights law and the Supreme Court’s 2023 Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard University and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina decisions that race-conscious admission policies were unconstitutional.

“Although SFFA addressed admissions decisions, the Supreme Court’s holding applies more broadly. At its core, the test is simple: If an educational institution treats a person of one race differently than it treats another person because of that person’s race, the educational institution violates the law," wrote Craig Trainor, acting assistant secretary for civil rights for the Education Department.

"Federal law thus prohibits covered entities from using race in decisions pertaining to admissions, hiring, promotion, compensation, financial aid, scholarships, prizes, administrative support, discipline, housing, graduation ceremonies, and all other aspects of student, academic, and campus life,” Trainor added.

Now, colleges are beginning to wonder just how far the Trump administration will push this interpretation, including whether it might insist that institutions retain standardized tests like the ACT and SAT as part of their admissions process.

Trainor wrote that while “some programs may appear neutral on their face, a closer look reveals that they are, in fact, motivated by racial considerations.”

The Department apparently will be on the lookout for colleges that attempt to rely on “non-racial information as a proxy for race” and then make decisions based on that information, Trainor suggested. As an example, it would “be unlawful,” he wrote, “for an educational institution to eliminate standardized testing to achieve a desired racial balance or to increase racial diversity.”

Whether it would be unlawful or not has not been addressed by any court, and Trainor’s sweeping interpretation of the law will likely be subject to legal challenge. But one implication of the letter is that DOE might be preparing to make colleges that no longer require standardized tests as part of their admission process defend that decision in court.

Akil Bello, FairTest’s Senior Director of Advocacy and Advancement, was more direct. “The DOE’s letter is a blatant overreach from the SFFA decision that goes far beyond repressive legalism and attempts to bully universities into adopting a suicide pact by narrowing access to higher education for deserving students of all backgrounds,” Bello said.

He added, “for example, since both MIT's and Dartmouth's justification for returning to use of standardized tests was that the test would allow them to increase their diversity, the letter would indicate that requiring the tests is in violation of its guidance but also that they cannot stop requiring the test. The letter demonstrates a commitment by the administration to chaos rather than governing.”

 
The full language in the DOE letter referring to admissions tests follows:

"Relying on non-racial information as a proxy for race, and making decisions based on that information, violates the law. That is true whether the proxies are used to grant preferences on an individual basis or a systematic one. It would, for instance, be unlawful for an educational institution to eliminate standardized testing to achieve a desired racial balance or to increase racial diversity."

 
The University of Pennsylvania has become the 6th among the 8 Ivy League universities (and the 8th among the 12 "Ivy Plus" universities) to reinstate its SAT/ACT requirement for applicants.

[Excerpts]

Beginning with the 2025-2026 undergraduate admissions cycle, Penn is reinstating a standardized testing requirement for applicants, with the goal of bringing clarity and transparency to the application process. Students applying for fall 2026 admission will be required to submit SAT or ACT scores as part of their admission materials. Penn’s updated policy will allow students facing hardship in accessing testing to submit a testing waiver with their application.

Penn pivoted to a test-optional policy in 2020-2021 to accommodate applicants facing significant hurdles accessing testing due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, the University has committed to reassessing this policy each year to determine whether and when it would be appropriate to reinstate the requirement. By returning to a testing requirement, Penn aims to remove uncertainty for applicants trying to decide whether to include their test scores.

 
The Philadelphia Inquirer has more on UPenn's decision:

[Excerpts]

The [University of Pennsylvania announced Friday that it would reinstate its standardized testing requirement for admission after a four-year pause spurred by the pandemic.

“The flexibility of a test-optional policy has escalated decision-making stress in an application process that is already stressful,” the university said on its admissions website. “Requiring submission of SAT or ACT results removes the ‘submission choice’ stress and allows students to focus their energy on preparing the components of the application that are personal and provide breadth and depth for our review.”

Penn, one of the most selective colleges in the country, announced in June 2020 that it would drop the requirement, joining a growing number of other schools at the time as the pandemic gripped the world.

Penn’s decision had followed an announcement by the College Board that an at-home SAT test would not be offered as planned, and as in-person tests had been canceled because of concerns about the spread of the virus.

 
IvyWise has gathered some statistics that will help to illustrate the current status of SAT/ACT score submission versus applicant admittance rates. The percentage of admittees and enrollees submitting test scores has trended closer to the overall percentage of students submitting scores in recent years, suggesting a diminishing penalty for not submitting scores. However, the test optional colleges that display a significant gap between these numbers (indicating that students who submit scores are considerably more likely to be admitted) are good candidates to reinstate their SAT/ACT requirements in the future. It should also be noted that most highly-selective colleges that have reinstated test score submission requirements have maintained or increased the number of applications they receive.

[Excerpts]

While a test-optional policy may work in your favor if you do not have the strongest test results, it is typically best to err on the side of caution and submit scores when you can. While choosing to withhold standardized testing results might not hinder your application, it could mean the difference of admission between you and another strong candidate who did opt to submit results.

It is also important to consider that test scores are one of the most significant metrics used in calculating college rankings and colleges that adopt test-optional policies may favor candidates who submit scores for their own ranking purposes. After all, many ranking systems (including the one developed by U.S. News & World Report) will only factor in a college’s test scores if a certain percentage of their applicants submit them.

 
The University of Miami (which has 13,000 enrollees) has announced that it will be reinstating its SAT/ACT requirement for the class enrolling in 2026.

[Excerpts]

The University of Miami will once again require prospective students to include standardized test scores as part of their undergraduate admissions application beginning with students applying to enter the University in the Fall 2026 semester.

The test score policy was paused in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. The University is reinstating the test score policy to provide an additional data point as part of its holistic review process. Therefore, most high school students, with some exceptions, will need to submit an SAT or ACT score with their admissions application.

Along with a student’s high school record and other factors, the SAT or ACT test results help shape the review process of a student’s application.

“While we recognize the value of changing the policy during the pandemic, we have decided to go back to including this information as our data show that standardized test scores can be a predictor of academic success,” said Guillermo “Willy” Prado, interim executive vice president for academic affairs and provost.

In reinstating the test score requirement on applications, the University joins other Association of American Universities (AAU) partner institutions, which began requiring test scores on their applications again recently, including Brown University, Dartmouth College, The Johns Hopkins University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Texas at Austin. In addition, all Florida public colleges require test scores.

 
The Atlantic has published a piece titled, "The Race-Blind College-Admissions Era Is Off to a Weird Start."

[Excerpts]

When colleges began announcing the makeup of their incoming freshman classes last year—the first admissions cycle since the Supreme Court outlawed affirmative action—there seemed to have been some kind of mistake. The Court’s ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard had been almost universally expected to produce big changes. Elite universities warned of a return to diversity levels not seen since the early 1960s, when their college classes had only a handful of Black students.

And yet, when the numbers came in, several of the most selective colleges in the country reported the opposite results. Yale, Dartmouth, Northwestern, the University of Virginia, Wesleyan, Williams, and Bowdoin all ended up enrolling more Black or Latino students, or both. Princeton and Duke appear to have kept their demographics basically stable.

These surprising results raise two competing possibilities. One is that top universities can preserve racial diversity without taking race directly into account in admissions. The other, favored by the coalition that successfully challenged affirmative action in court, is that at least some of the schools are simply ignoring the Supreme Court’s ruling—that they are, in other words, cheating. Finding out the truth will likely require litigation that could drag on for years. Although affirmative action was outlawed in 2023, the war over the use of race in college admissions is far from over.

History strongly suggested that the end of affirmative action would be disastrous for diversity in elite higher education. (Most American colleges accept most applicants and therefore didn’t use affirmative action in the first place.) In the states that had already banned the practice for public universities, the share of Black and Latino students enrolled at the most selective flagship campuses immediately plummeted. At UC Berkeley, for example, underrepresented minorities made up 22 percent of the freshman class in 1997. In 1998, after California passed its affirmative-action ban, that number fell to 11 percent. Many of these schools eventually saw a partial rebound, but not enough to restore their previous demographic balance.

Something similar happened at many selective schools in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling. At Harvard and MIT, for example, Black enrollment fell by more than 28 and 60 percent, respectively, compared with the average of the two years prior to the Court’s decision. But quite a few institutions defied expectations. At Yale, Black and Latino enrollment increased, while Asian American enrollment fell by 16 percent compared with recent years. Northwestern similarly saw its Black and Latino populations increase by more than 10 percent, while Asian and white enrollment declined. (In Students for Fair Admissions, the Court had found that Harvard’s race-conscious admissions policies discriminated against Asian applicants.)

To keep numbers stable, race-neutral alternatives would have to provide a comparable boost. According to simulations presented to the Supreme Court, universities would have to eliminate legacy and donor preferences and slightly lower their average SAT scores to keep demographics constant without considering race. (In oral arguments, one lawyer compared the change in test scores to moving “from Harvard to Dartmouth.”) With minor exceptions, selective universities have given no indication that they’ve made either of those changes.

In many ways, the endless fight over affirmative action is a proxy for the battle over what uber-selective universities are for. Institutions such as Harvard and Yale have long been torn between conflicting aims: on the one hand, creating the next generation of leaders out of the most accomplished applicants; on the other, serving as engines of social mobility for promising students with few opportunities. It will take much more than the legal demise of affirmative action to put that debate to rest.

 
The University of California is still "test blind" (it will not consider SAT/ACT scores as part of the admissions process) but does offer students an option to share their scores once admitted for course placement and the potential avoidance of remedial classes, which may incentivize certain students to take the exams:

[Excerpts]

Test scores submitted as part of the application may be used as an alternate method of fulfilling minimum requirements for eligibility or for course placement after matriculation at UC.

Students can self-report ACT and/or SAT scores in the admission application, but they must first submit the application without scores. Once the application has been submitted, the student can log back into the application to report ACT or SAT scores. If a student self-reports a test score, they should provide the official score report when they receive an offer of admission from UC.

 
Scammers are still preying on parents of high school students in a scheme claiming to require a deposit for SAT test prep materials that students have supposedly requested:

[Excerpts]

For high school students, SAT and ACT scores are a huge deal. With college admissions and scholarships on the line, paying for tutors and test prep materials may be worth the price. But watch out for con artists eager to take advantage of this. Scammers — with access to kids’ names and school information — are tricking parents into paying for bogus SAT and ACT prep materials. This is how the scam works:

You get an unsolicited call from a person claiming to be from the College Board, the company responsible for the PSAT, SAT and AP tests, or another educational organization. The caller claims to be confirming your address, so they can send test prep materials, such as books, CDs, or videos, that your child requested at school.

It seems so believable! Several people reported to BBB Scam Tracker that the caller even had their child’s name, phone number, address, school information, and/or the date and location of their child’s scheduled test.

Of course, there’s a catch. The caller needs you to pay a deposit, sometimes several hundred dollars, for the materials. They claim it will be refunded when the materials are returned after a set number of days. Unfortunately, if you provide your address and credit card details, the materials will never arrive, and your deposit will never be refunded. Scammers now have your credit card number and other personal information.

 
Applicants to SpaceX have stated that the company has been asking for their SAT scores, even for those with advanced degrees and extensive work histories.