The New York Times covers an announcement by Stanford University that SAT/ACT scores will be required from all applicants starting in the fall of 2025:

[Excerpts]

Stanford University announced Friday that it was reinstating the requirement for standardized test scores in undergraduate admissions, becoming the latest of a small but growing number of elite colleges to go back to the practice after abandoning it during the pandemic.

The change will take effect in fall 2025, and students applying to enroll in fall 2026 and beyond will need to provide SAT or ACT scores in their applications. Standardized test scores will remain optional for those applying this fall to enroll next year.

Other selective schools that in recent months have reverted to requiring those test scores include Harvard, Brown, Yale, Dartmouth, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Georgetown, Purdue, the California Institute of Technology and the University of Texas at Austin.

In a statement explaining the move, Stanford officials said that a faculty committee on undergraduate admission had found that test scores were “an important predictor of academic performance at Stanford.” But they said the scores would be “one part of a holistic review” of applicants that will also consider factors like classroom achievement, backgrounds and whether a student has worked jobs or taken on family responsibilities.

Stanford’s reasoning was largely in line with that of other universities that made similar decisions. Many have cited recent research showing that test scores help predict students’ college grades, and their chances of graduation and post-college success. Grades are not as accurate a predictor, researchers say, because of issues like grade inflation that make it difficult to assess a student’s work. Studies have also shown that standardized tests can help universities find lower-income students and students of color who will thrive.

 
Here is the announcement from the Stanford website:

[Excerpts]

Stanford will resume requiring either the SAT or the ACT for undergraduate admission, beginning with students applying in fall 2025 for admission to the Class of 2030. Stanford will remain test-optional for students applying in fall 2024 for admission to the Class of 2029.

Performance on standardized tests is an important predictor of academic performance at Stanford, a review by the faculty Committee on Undergraduate Admission and Financial Aid has confirmed. The renewed testing requirement will allow Stanford to consider the fullest array of information in support of each student’s application.

The university is reinstating the test requirement in a manner that will allow all students enough lead time to plan and prepare for testing. Scores from the SAT or ACT will only be required beginning with students applying in fall 2025 for admission to the Class of 2030.

 
Jon Boeckenstedt has written an item titled "College Board is Doing it Again", which addresses the ongoing shortfall of testing centers (particularly on the West coast), and how the College Board has failed to respond appropriately, forcing many high schools to step in and devote time and effort to become SAT testing centers:

[Excerpts]

During the COVID-19 pandemic, College Board moved to a 45-minute, online AP exam. It was a time of great stress and uncertainty, of course, and with regard to logistics and mechanics, they had no choice but to scramble. But in doing so, they did two other things that were completely consistent with their mission to generate as much cash as possible: First, they announced that colleges would accept the new, 45-minute exams just like they did the traditional, much longer exams.

The only problem with that was that they failed to ask the colleges. Oh, sure, they asked a few of their super fans if it would be OK, and the superfans said, “Sure! No problem!” (I did want to ask the faculty senates and other bodies at the institutions where the super fans worked if they had checked and gone through regular academic channels to get things approved, but I thought the better of it.)

This evil, yet ingenious strategy made the colleges the bad guy: If we wanted to insist on validation studies, or other assurances that College Board was certain the new tests were equivalent, or god forbid, if we wanted to say, “Nope, no way we’re going to take those,” it seemed like we were being unreasonable. And being unfair to students.

What they’ve done here, of course, is to take the concern other people have for students, and leverage it to get what they want. A sociopathic and narcissistic organization considers its own needs to be its top priority, and by wrapping those needs in a layer of artificial concern for students, they take advantage of people who have, you know, actual feelings.

They’re doing it again with testing centers on the west coast, which are in short supply given that until a few months ago, no public university west of the Mississippi required the SAT, and the public universities in California won’t even consider it. High school counselors have been asking College Board to add testing centers and/or dates, to no avail.

You could perhaps forgive College Board, if you believed for one second that they woke up one Sunday morning and learned about Dartmouth going back to the SAT requirement by reading the New York Times like the rest of us did. But I had heard about it a month before via rumblings in the admissions community. And I strongly suspect College Board research heavily influenced the decision, and in fact, I think there is a good possibility College Board staff helped with analysis of the data. (This is just my opinion. I have no proof of this, so call off the lawyers.) The language in the announcements from Dartmouth, Yale, Harvard, et al, just sound too much like presentations made at other universities like Purdue when test-optional admission was under consideration. It was only later that a potential conflict of interest was revealed publicly and the information presented was re-examined (however, Purdue still requires the SAT or ACT.)

...there is, in my opinion, no reason the College Board should not have seen an increase in demand for testing centers coming, and planned and prepared better for it. It’s Supply Chain 101, and you’d think their president would have learned about such basics in his time at McKinsey, a job he took after he couldn’t get a teaching job.

What I saw today, and what I’m hearing publicly is that high schools are now caving, and beginning to offer themselves up as testing centers. This is great, of course, for College Board, but not always so great for the volunteers and underpaid proctors who have to give up their Saturday; or to students who have to give up instructional time if there is a school day offering. The needs of the College Board come first. If you genuinely care about students, you have to take matters into your own hands.

And I don’t suppose I have to tell you which schools are the ones that are likely to get the most pressure from parents to solve this College Board problem, do I? It’s the parents of the kids who already have a lot of advantages in the admission process.

As I wrote last year, College Board is a business, and the sooner we start thinking that way, the better off we’ll all be. And, as a business, they seem to be doing fine. As a not-for-profit business, they’re doing just great, as evidenced by their most recently available form 990 Tax return. You can see the whole thing here.

So, they’re doing it again. And I don’t know why people stand for it.

 
In a follow-up piece by Boeckenstedt, he floats the concept of the colleges and universities that want to require SAT scores buying the College Board's assets, and therefore administering the SAT testing program themselves:

[Excerpts]

Last week, I wrote about how College Board and the Highly Rejective Colleges are to blame for the concerns being expressed by many high school and independent counselors about the lack of SAT testing sites in their communities. In some discussion groups I participate in, these concerns are increasing and amplifying. And to date, College Board has done nothing about it that I can see.

Part of this, of course, is the timing of the announcements by the colleges, to take effect for the next application cycle. This caught a lot of people off guard, as you might expect, and has created a new sense of urgency among the huddling masses yearning to get into one of the “elite” institutions. And part of the problem is the College Board, which has shown time and time again that they’re really good at self-promotion and at boasting about their mission to “connect students and colleges,” but pretty crappy when it comes to things like logistics, customer service, common sense, and honesty.

The crux of the problem, as I read the complaints, is that College Board, a company with over $2B in assets, and positive bottom line financial performance of over $100M per year, is relying on the largess of schools and low-paid proctors to solve the problem created by the Highly Rejectives. In other words, “You people who claim to be in education for the good of students should shoulder this burden; don’t expect us on Vesey Street to do so. We hardly ever hear these complaints.”

So I started thinkin’ and researchin’, and here is my solution.

If College Board can’t meet market demands, and if a small subset of wealthy universities want to require a test, let’s get these two star-crossed lovers in a room and let them get down to business.

I went to GuideStar last night and downloaded the most recent federal tax returns of all the private institutions now requiring the SAT (or those about to). Because financial performance goes up and down, I averaged two years of data to get a single-year average, and came up with this.

[Graphic titled "Average of Two-Years of Operating Surpluses at institutions requiring the SAT", showing the figures for nine universities (Yale, Harvard, MIT, Cornell, Dartmouth, Brown, Stanford, Georgetown, and CalTech).]

Your eyes do not deceive you: Collectively, these institutions have–in the two most recent years available–generated a collective operating surplus of almost $20B, or about $9.9B per year. That’s not a typo: Nine billion dollars per year.

Using standard business calculations, and considering the College Board’s annual bottom line of $130,000,000, I’d guess that these institutions could purchase the financial assets and business operations of College Board for ($130,000,000 * 20) + $1,600,000,000, or about $4.2B, or roughly half of the leftover pile of cash these places generate each year. That, of course, is still a lot of money, but the average contribution will go down when Princeton, Penn, Northwestern, Rice, and others follow suit shortly. And, of course, it is not a lot of money compared to the collective $183B in collective endowment assets of these fine institutions, data I also downloaded last night from IPEDS.

If these places want to require the SAT, they should pay for it, and not hoist the burden on already over-worked staff at high schools. Even if College Board paid decent proctor stipends that would convince people to give up precious weekend time, there is still considerable cost to the schools to run the program.

And just think: The universities could create a better test, free of the pressures of running a business that has to look like a not-for-profit. They could sell shares in the new venture to any college that wanted to use the rebranded SAT. And they could pay people what their time and labor are worth.

 
Several recent articles and op-eds have focused on the crisis of test center availability currently being experienced by West coast students, which has only been exacerbated by the recent reinstatement of SAT/ACT requirements at elite colleges and universities. SF Gate examines the issue:

[Excerpts]

Alice Onderwater, a junior at Alameda High School, was prepared to travel hundreds of miles to Santa Barbara to take the SAT because she couldn’t find any available testing sites.

Then she got a break, or at least she thought so. When she landed a last-minute seat at an Oakland testing site scheduled for June 1, Onderwater canceled her trip. But when a Wi-Fi problem forced the cancellation of the Oakland test after it was supposed to begin, she and 1,400 students were out of luck (the SAT is now conducted online). And now, there aren’t any available seats in the Bay Area for months.

“It was my first and only chance to take it for the school year, and I was fairly pissed off because I had other plans that I canceled in order to keep the test,” Onderwater said. “I had been ready for the test.”

In San Francisco for example, there are only two testing centers, one at Lowell High School and the other at Sacred Heart Cathedral Preparatory. When SFGATE searched with a San Francisco ZIP code on the College Board’s SAT Test Center Search, we found there aren’t any seats available within 100 miles for the next test, on Aug. 24. The soonest available test in the city would be at Lowell on March 8, 2025.

College counselors confirmed to SFGATE that it’s become extremely difficult to secure a seat for the SAT test in Northern California. It’s a problem that began when many testing centers were eliminated during the pandemic. But four years later, availability hasn’t rebounded, even as an interest in taking the SAT has grown. And there’s a danger of leaving some disadvantaged students behind.

“Those people on top of it are calling us right after testing opens, [saying] ‘I can’t get a seat for 100 miles away until August,’ which is crazy,” Kristen Hansen, a co-director of college counseling at Drew School, a high school in San Francisco, told SFGATE.

Holly Stepp, a spokesperson for the College Board, the organization that administers the SAT, acknowledged that the College Board is seeing a high demand for the test. She said one of the reasons there aren’t enough seats, specifically in the Bay Area and California, is that many test locations have not reopened since the pandemic. Area high schools also aren’t willing to serve as weekend testing centers, Stepp added, and a majority of California schools balk at administering tests during the school day, a time during which most SATs in the country are conducted.

Some school officials, though, believe that in-class SAT testing takes away from students’ daily learning. “The flip side of this is that it requires those same schools to forgo actual school, to pull teachers and other staff out of classrooms in order to proctor and the compensation and disruption are disproportionate to the resources of the College Board,” Lauren Gersick, a co-director of college counseling at Urban School of San Francisco, told SFGATE in an email.

Gersick said even before the pandemic, weekend testing was in high demand. She said test administrators aren’t paid enough for weekend testing, making it difficult to recruit people.

“There is no motivation for a school to host weekend exams — even with the new, easier-to-proctor digital SAT, because of the lift required to retain proctors, open school buildings and the need to make sure testers have devices that will work for the exam,” she said.

In a letter to the College Board viewed by SFGATE, Bay Area and Seattle school counselors wrote that the lack of testing centers has been an ongoing problem for the past decade. The counselors called proctoring the exam a “logistical nightmare.”

The counselors said they want the College Board to take control of administering the test since the board requires the scores for college admissions. In the letter, they asked the College Board to communicate with colleges and communicate when new centers are available.

“If colleges want to see these tests accessed equitably, it should fall on the colleges or the College Board to host or manage test center sites,” the letter said.

 
This student opinion piece in the LA Times offers a personal perspective from a California student traveling to take the SAT in Texas due to lack of testing centers in his area:

[Excerpts]

I live in Northern California, but I’m traveling to Texas to take the SAT on Saturday.

It’s not due to lack of planning on my part. I went on the College Board site to register for the June SAT the first hour of the first day that students could sign up. But within minutes, all the seats in my county and across Northern California were gone. Registering for the SAT in the Bay Area is as difficult as snagging tickets to a Taylor Swift concert.

I’m not the only one in California going to extremes to find a place to take a college entrance exam. One mom in my community posted on her Facebook page, “It took two months of effort and three calls into ACT to get a spot that is over 100 miles away!” Other California families joined the conversation explaining: “Same thing in SoCal. Last year we had to drive 100 miles for an 8AM test so we spent the night… so irritating.”

I know SAT and ACT tests are controversial. I’m not here to debate whether they should exist. The fact is, they still matter whether we like it or not. As it stands for the 2025 college application cycle, only 4% of four-year colleges are test blind, meaning they don’t accept test scores. Most schools (87%) are test-optional (a.k.a. test-preferred) and the remaining 9% are test-required, according to Fairtest. If a good test score could potentially increase my chances of getting accepted to 96% of four-year colleges, I want access to that test. And as long as most colleges are test-optional, those exams should be readily available to all high school students.

So yes, I am traveling 1,800 miles to take the SAT . (We chose Dallas because they had lots of seats available and cheap flights.) Having parents with the financial means and the flexibility in their work schedules to get me to a testing site far from home is an advantage many others don’t have. The lack of testing sites in California is not just an inconvenience, it’s an equity issue.

California students who can’t take the test because of lack of access will miss out on admission opportunities to some colleges and to scholarships that consider or require SAT/ACT scores in their decisions. For many students, especially those from low-income families, this could mean losing out on aid that would make college affordable.

Lack of adequate testing sites seems to be especially problematic in Northern California. Looking at the Aug. 24 SAT testing date demonstrates this. If you’d searched the College Board website earlier this week for testing centers within 100 miles of San Francisco, Dallas and New York City, you’d have found 103 testing sites in the New York area, 49 of which still had available seats. In the Dallas area there were 69 testing sites and 65 of them still had availability. But in the Bay Area, there were only 12 testing sites and they were 100% booked for the August test. In fact, the nearest test center to San Francisco with availability was 405 miles away. This lack of access puts Northern California students at a disadvantage.

 
With the new, digital SAT, things can go wrong even for students who manage to secure scarce testing slots, as in the case covered by ABC News:

[Excerpts]

Over 1,000 high school students who were about to take the Scholastic Aptitude Test, or SATs, in the East Bay on Saturday morning could not take the exam.

Isabelle Davis was one of the students who showed up at the Oakland Marriot Saturday morning, signed up to take the SAT test.

"It was really shocking and disappointing. Especially because I have been preparing for this for weeks," Davis said. "We study so much for it, pay a lot for tutors, and we get there and we can't take the test."

Students couldn't take the test because the Wi-Fi wasn't working. That's according to the College Board, which administers the SAT. In a statement to ABC7 News, it says that over 1,400 students were not able to take the test because of the Wi-Fi problem.

"You'd think that they have been running this organization for like, a 100 years, they'd have a backup plan," Davis said.

Davis said the students sat in limbo for three hours until they were told to go home.

While some colleges no longer require the SAT as part of the application, Davis is applying to schools that do. Early applications are due in November. And Davis says there are no remaining Bay Area test dates to meet that deadline.

"It's shocking really. There is no accountability. And that's very clear," said Brian Davis, Isabelle's father.

As a parent, he is frustrated that his daughter may now be at a disadvantage. And he adds that there needs to be more accountability when problems like this arise.

"It's a monopoly. It's not like you can take the test from somebody else. You're stuck. And so they have no accountability. They treat these students very poorly. And no one is holding them to account," Davis said.

In its statement, the College Board says student demand has exceeded capacity. And that there's a shortage of test centers. The College Board says that it did, however, add capacity for 6,000 extra seats for the May and June test dates.

"If you look at the College Board testing sites now, it is all full," said Eunice Charles.

She says she was told that her son will get his money back. But her concern is how and when he can re-test -- not a refund.

"I just want to know if they are going to offer another date? Is it going to be easy for us to get a date? Can you open up more space for us, the students who missed it today?" Charles said.

 
An article in Forbes opines that selective colleges and universities that are reinstating SAT/ACT requirements should also take part in a growing program that provides a way for low-income high school students to take college classes and enter the college pipeline:

[Excerpts]

Claims that standardized tests can find well-qualified candidates from disadvantaged backgrounds, serving like some kind of a diamond-in-the-rough detector, may be true. And, while many observers remain skeptical, schools that have become convinced by that logic may be able to use the tests to yield socioeconomically and racially diverse entering classes.

However, there’s a flip side to this issue. For every traditionally underserved applicant given a boost by a good test score, innumerable others will be overlooked because they lacked the resources to prep for the tests or their scores fail to reflect their true academic abilities.

As Akil Bello, the Senior Director of Advocacy for FairTest noted, universities “can trot out the heart-warming story of the rare successful graduate ‘saved’ by the test, (but) they do not publicize the countless individual narratives of deserving, capable, hard-working low income students whose college dreams were snuffed by standardized testing.”

Selective universities can use standardized tests if they want, but if they’re genuinely dedicated to being institutions of opportunity, they need to supplement those tests with other strategies intended to find, recruit and nurture talented students who risk being overlooked, discouraged or disqualified by too much reliance on the SAT/ACT.

It’s the National Education Equity Lab, an education justice nonprofit that I’ve written about before. Founded in 2019 by Leslie Cornfeld, a former federal civil rights prosecutor and advisor to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and two U.S. Secretaries of Education, the Lab has become one of the nation’s leading models for preparing low-income and traditionally underserved students to enroll and succeed in college.

It’s the first to do so at scale, helping fill the college pipeline with talented students who might have otherwise never have believed they could succeed at college. College admission offices seem to agree. Richard Shaw, dean of admissions and financial aid at Stanford University, said he thought the program would “become one of the most important models in the nation to introduce admissions offices to incredible students they wouldn't otherwise find and to introduce those students to incredible colleges they would otherwise not consider.”

A first of its kind, here’s how the Lab works.

School districts serving students in low-income high schools are invited to participate. Principals pick the high school teachers who assist college faculty in offering the course, and they also select the students - typically about 25 per course.

Many Ed Equity Lab high schools offer multiple courses – meaning students can graduate having completed a semester or more of transferable credits, resulting in substantial tuition savings.

Since starting in 2019, the program has scaled up quickly. It’s now served over 25,000 students, 10,000 just this year. It’s in 132 school districts across 33 states. The Lab’ goal is to reach more than one million students over the next ten years.

“Our students have demonstrated that talent is equally distributed, opportunity is not,’’ said Cornfeld. Over 80% of students completing a Lab course pass it. Many students take pass multiple classes, giving them a strong start on their college degrees.

If the rationale for standardized tests is that they predict college success, passing Ed Equity Lab courses goes one step better — it’s not a prediction, it’s a confirmation of college readiness. Rather than relying on a fallible proxy of future college performance, why not test students’ ability in a real college class. The Lab’s growing list of college partners understands that and are using more holistic reviews of candidates from under-resourced communities.

The roster of universities now participating in the Ed Equity Lab includes Princeton, Stanford, Georgetown, Cornell, Wesleyan University, Barnard, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, Spelman College, Morehouse College, Brown University, all campuses in the University of California, Howard University, and Arizona State University.

However, the question remains — why aren’t even more prominent colleges and universities taking part in the program? For example, most of the 140 institutions in the American Talent Initiative are struggling to reach the ATI goal of enrolling 50,000 more Pell Grant recipients by 2025. Given the Lab’s proven success in building talent pipelines for exactly the kinds of students ATI aims to educate, more ATI institutions should consider partnering with it.

If colleges see a decline in the socioeconomic and racial diversity of their incoming classes this fall — as many observers are expecting — they’ll have plenty of factors to blame, including themselves.