The College Board has released the 2024 SAT testing report. The number of students from the graduating class of 2024 taking the SAT during high school increased by 3% from the previous year. The SAT School Day program (in which students take the SAT during a school day at their high school under state and school district contracts) continues to grow in scale, accounting for 68% of student testing. Excerpts from the College Board press release follow:

[Excerpts]

The 2024 SAT Suite of Assessments Annual Report released today shows that more than 1.97 million students in the high school class of 2024 took the SAT at least once, up from 1.91 million in the class of 2023. In the class of 2024, 68% of SAT takers tested during the school day, the highest percentage to date and the seventh consecutive year of growth for the SAT School Day program. The 2023-24 school year marked the transition to digital testing in the United States, including the PSAT/NMSQT in fall 2023 and the launch of the digital SAT in spring 2024.

As SAT participation approaches pre-pandemic levels, the growth in test taking reinforces that students and educators in K–12 and higher ed recognize the value of the SAT as a way to identify students’ knowledge and strengths and connect them to college, scholarship, and career resources and opportunities.

Now that the full SAT Suite is administered digitally, the entire testing experience is significantly shorter and easier for students and educators. Students and testing staff overwhelmingly say they prefer the digital test over paper and pencil due to the easy-to-use Bluebook™ student testing app and a shorter test and test day.

SAT School Day continues to grow since its introduction 10 years ago, reaching a record high this year. Nearly 1.35 million students in the class of 2024 took the SAT through the SAT School Day program, which provides schools, districts, and states a way to offer the SAT to juniors and seniors in school, on a weekday, often at no cost to students.

Mean SAT Scores

For the third consecutive year, the average SAT total score declined, down to 1024 for the class of 2024, compared to 1028 for the class of 2023. This decline is a post-pandemic trend observed in other national assessments including the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). In this year’s graduating class, 39% of SAT takers met or exceeded both the Evidence-Based Reading and Writing and Math college readiness benchmarks, which indicate a likelihood for success in credit-bearing college coursework.

 
Nicholas Lemann, Author of The Big Test (the definitive book about the history of the SAT) and former dean of the Columbia University School of Journalism has sat for an interview with Inside Higher Ed about his new book. The work examines the dramatic changes in American college testing and admissions over the last 25 years.

[Excerpts]

A lot has changed since Nicholas Lemann last wrote about college admissions tests in his 1999 book, The Big Test. A progressive movement against standardized test requirements took off in the 2000s, the COVID-19 pandemic forced the majority of colleges to make test scores optional and the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in admissions, making the question of testing’s impact on college diversity more relevant than ever.

The longtime New Yorker writer’s new book, Higher Admissions: The Rise, Decline, and Return of Standardized Testing (Princeton University Press) grapples with the effects of those changes and roots them in the complicated history of the first standardized college admissions exam, the SAT. He charts a path from its origins as an IQ-based aptitude test designed to help highly selective colleges expand their talent pool to its ubiquitous acceptance in the 1980s and ’90s and to the contentious debates over its fairness that erupted, faded and returned again.

Lemann spoke with Inside Higher Ed about the past, present and future of college admissions exams and how their evolution is inextricably tied up with efforts to integrate and democratize American higher education. The conversation, edited for length and clarity, follows.

Q: In the book you write that “a great deal of trouble has come from our tendency to conflate elite selection with mass opportunity.” Do you think the purpose behind the SAT has changed substantially since its inception as what you call an elite selection tool?

Nicholas Lemann: I think the de facto purpose has not really changed since they started. Henry Chauncey [the first head of longtime SAT administrator Educational Testing Services] was somebody I got to know very well, and I don’t think he particularly had a vision. He was an incredibly good administrator of a nonprofit organization, but he just sort of believed tests are good because they’re scientific and science is good. I think [James] Conant [former Harvard president and architect of the SAT], who was sort of his mentor, did have a vision that was very clear, and it started as wanting to change the kind of person that goes to Harvard. And then it became, “I want to change the kind of person who goes to Ivy League schools,” or the then-small membership of the College Board. And then it gets into World War II and the Cold War, and his rhetoric becomes grander, and the SAT becomes more of a mass device. It’s basically The Republic by Plato: He thought you should have a society that is run by an intellectual elite plucked out of their origin, who will then be whisked away to be educated for free at the great universities and then go on to become these technocratic public servants. The SAT was designed as a tool to do that.

Q: Earlier this year, Dartmouth, Yale and other universities, in deciding to bring back test requirements, argued that standardized tests can actually enhance diversity and equity because they allowed admissions officers to find exceptional applicants from underresourced schools and regions that they otherwise might not look at. What do you make of that argument?

Nicholas Lemann: There’s this prevailing diamond in the rough theory, or what I call Cinderella at the ball theory. But the number of people in the U.S. who come from the bottom half of the income distribution and get 1500-plus combined SAT scores is a really, really small number. I could not get the College Board to give me the number straight up, and I tried, but I know it’s very small. So the question is, how much do you want to engineer a whole system just to find these few people?

[Raj] Chetty [head of the research firm Opportunity Insights, whose research was cited in many college decisions to reinstate testing] and his team are really into this old-fashioned meritocratic ideology. It’s incredibly appealing to people, and it’s nothing new. If you go back and read all the Horatio Alger novels and all the popular rhetoric from the 19th century about log cabin presidents, there’s always been this literature in America about how Andrew Carnegie started from nothing and so on. It hits the national soul in a big way. There’s still this idea that if we can produce a small number of people, an almost anecdotal number of people, who come from absolutely nothing and get to the top, then that proves we have a good society.

Q: What effect has the normalization of these standardized admissions tests had on American high school education?

Nicholas Lemann: These tests have become very important for the people who don’t get into elite schools, too—not just the people who do get into elite schools. If we had a curriculum-based testing system where everybody in high school was taking very similar curriculum and they were tested on the mastery of that curriculum, as is true in many developed countries, then the person who isn’t going to go to an elite school benefits because they’ll study harder and try to get a better score. Instead, the curriculum is infused with preparation for these tests that, for most students, just don’t matter much.

The issue is not necessarily testing itself, per se. Tests are tools that serve purposes and visions. If I go to your house and I think your house really sucks in some way—it’s ugly, it’s unstable or something—and I said to you, “The real problem with your house is the hammer that the carpenters were using to build it,” that would be obviously absurd. It would be the design and so on. But with testing, somehow people don’t see the design behind it. And so instead of arguing about the vision and the purpose, they argue about the test itself. If you think there’s a problem with the way American higher education is set up, rather than trying to fix the tests, you’re better off fixing the vision behind them.

Q: Colleges have largely responded to growing public criticism of standardized tests by making them optional or not considering them at all; there have been no recent efforts to revise the SAT or ACT along lines that might make them more equitable. Why do you think that is?

Nicholas Lemann: A few reasons. One is that, from a technical standpoint, it’s all about the predictive validity coefficient [the equation used to trace tests’ ability to predict academic performance in college]. The problem has always been that, within the testing world, all of these proposed reforms that could make the tests as instruments a lot more fair then start degrading the project of predictive validity. It stands to reason that, if you’re my kid, growing up on the campus of Columbia University [where Lemann teaches], it’s not going to be a big culture shock to go to college, compared to a low-income Black or Latino student. So if you’re trying to design an instrument to have the highest possible predictive power for first-year grades in college, that difference constrains you.

The second [reason] is our lack of a national curriculum. We saw the fascinating and spectacular failure of the Common Core as an example of the difficulty of having a national curriculum in the U.S., which is really an outlier; other countries don’t have this issue because they have national curricula and they have a curriculum-based test. There was a test proposed to go along with the Common Core, called Smart Balance, that would have been our version of this.

The other reason is faculty. I don’t know if you’re old enough to have heard an older relative who would say, “Let me tell you about my first day in college,” law school, whatever, where the professor gets up and says, “Look to the left of you. Look to the right of you. One of those people won’t be here next year.” That was kind of how it used to work: They had an audition flunk-out method, which was a big pain in the neck for professors and administrators. The SAT was a way of ensuring that the students are going to be like mini versions of the faculty—they’re not going to need a lot of remediation and counseling, and they’re going to be almost certain to graduate from the minute they get their acceptance letter. To faculty, that is very attractive.

 
John Hopkins has announced that it will reinstate an SAT/ACT testing requirement for students applying to the 2026 freshman class. Forbes has the story:

[Excerpts]

Johns Hopkins University will require SAT or ACT scores for undergraduate admission beginning with the 2025-2026 application cycle. In June, Stanford University also reinstated standardized test requirements for the next admissions period.

Johns Hopkins’s reinstatement follows its review of academic research on testing and analysis of the school’s three-year experience of test-optional admissions.

“With input from faculty colleagues, the review concluded that test scores, when considered in context as part of a holistic approach to admissions, serve as an important predictive metric to assess the likelihood of a student's academic success at Johns Hopkins,” the university stated on its website.

“The reinstatement of standardized testing at Johns Hopkins comes as no surprise, as selective schools are seeing compelling data from their recent test-optional classes reinforcing the value of standardized testing, more so than high school GPA, in predicting undergraduate success,” says Hafeez Lakhani, founder of Lakhani Coaching.

 
Reason magazine examines the continuing rise in high school grades, despite a reduction in standardized test scores:

[Excerpts]

High school students' grades keep getting better, but standardized tests tell a different story. According to new research, while grade inflation is continuing to drive high school grades up, students are slipping on more objective measures of learning. As more and more colleges are turning away from a recent shift towards test-optional admissions, this data indicates that asking students for their standardized test scores is increasingly necessary to gauge learning.

Last month, the ACT released research indicating that student GPA in the post-COVID-19 era has declined in its power to predict student success in college. In contrast, standardized test scores stayed relatively stable in their ability to predict whether students will receive passing grades in their first year of college.

According to researchers, the average high school GPA, measured on a 4.0 scale, has risen slightly since 2017, increasing from 3.44 to 3.59. While ACT scores stayed fairly stable from the mid-90s to 2019, they faltered during and after the pandemic, declining from 20.7 on a 36-point scale in 2019 to 19.5 in 2023. The decline was particularly steep between 2021 and 2022, falling from 20.3 to 19.8. While these drops seem small, they portend a significant problem.

"When we're talking about over a million students, then seeing a half-point drop in one year is a big decline….We haven't seen a change like that in the last 10 years or even in the last 30 years," Rose Babington, senior director for state partnerships at ACT, told Reason in 2022.

"For colleges, these findings indicate that using high school grade point average without a confirming alternative measure of achievement may lead them to fail to identify students who may need additional supports," the study reads. "These findings suggest that colleges should encourage students to submit their ACT scores so that colleges can better assess the potential success of students."

Another research paper, published earlier this year paints a similar picture. The study, from the Equitable Grading Project, looked at more than 30,000 grades from the 2021-2022 and 2022-2023 school years. When compared to students' performance on corresponding standardized tests, researchers found that almost 60 percent of grades "did not match the standardized test scores designed to measure students' content knowledge of those courses." Two-thirds of these mismatched grades were inflated, an outcome that affected low-income, black, and Hispanic students most.

These results indicate that grade inflation is rampant, and colleges should turn back toward standardized testing in admissions if they want to reliably predict which student will be able to handle the rigors of college.

 
A panel at the just-concluded annual NACAC conference weighed in on the challenges of assessing the impact of standardized testing policies in a dynamic admissions landscape. Higher Ed Dive has coverage:

[Excerpts]

Advocates for standardized testing say the scores help college officials determine which applicants would thrive academically at their institutions.

But Harry Feder, executive director of FairTest, pushed back on this argument.

“What do the tests tell us? They tell us how wealthy your parents are. To near perfect correlation,” he told conference attendees.

Students from families in the top 1% of income are 13 times more likely than students from the bottom 20% to score 1300 or higher on the SAT, Feder said, citing an analysis last year from research group Opportunity Insights. And only 2.5% of students from the lowest income quintile scored 1300 or above.

Wake Forest University, a private research institution in North Carolina, adopted its own test-optional policy in 2008 — well before the pandemic. It hasn’t found differences in academic achievement between students who elected to submit test scores and those who didn’t, Feder said.

The majority of four-year colleges do not require entrance exams. But academia’s obsession with standardized tests is spurred by the general public’s fascination with a handful of top institutions, according to Feder.

“The day that Yale went back to requiring the SAT, there was an article in the New York Times about it,” he said. Yet the University of Michigan had announced only the day before that it was formally keeping its test-optional policy.

But Feder said he didn’t see the University of Michigan’s policy get the same media coverage. > That’s despite the public flagship drawing more applicants and having a larger undergraduate student body than Yale.
Sheila Akbar [president and CEO of the academic consultancy Signet Education] said the students and parents she works with have a hard time believing they truly don’t need to submit scores to test-optional colleges. And that feeling is often reinforced by conflicting messages from colleges.

Akbar said she will show families institutional profiles on the Common Data Set. The database — a collaboration led by the College Board, U.S. News & World Report and educational services Peterson’s — offers standardized college profiles that include information about their admissions methodology.

“We’ll see a test-optional school that has marked test scores as ‘very important’ on the CDS. What are we supposed to make of that?” she asked. “It gives truth to their skepticism.”

To combat confusion and weakening trust, Akbar said colleges should clearly communicate their expectations and define what makes a strong applicant.

The California Institute of Technology, known more commonly as CalTech, announced in June 2020 that it would switch to test-free admissions. While students can elect to include test scores under a test-optional policy, under test-free policies an admissions team will not accept or consider applicants’ SAT and ACT scores.

At that time, Nikki Chun served as CalTech’s director of undergraduate admissions, and she said the distinction was crucial.

“I kept saying to the faculty, there is no world where somebody is going to be convinced that CalTech is test optional,” Chun said. “I do not want our staff spending an inordinate amount of time trying to explain to students, ‘No, really, we mean optional!’”

In 2022, CalTech said an internal study found that standardized test scores “have little to no power” predicting first-year students’ academic performance in mandatory math and physics classes.

However, the highly selective institution ultimately restored its standardized test requirement for undergraduate admission this April.

The change followed a recommendation from a faculty advisory committee. The university said the scores provide “useful information about academic preparedness as part of a holistic consideration of all prospective students.”

CalTech’s reversal took effect immediately, beginning with students applying this fall.

Quick admissions changes are part of why many students and their families are so wary of taking colleges’ policies at face value, according to Akbar. Not only are prospective students navigating different rules for each college they consider, she said, they are being forced to predict if and when those policies may change.

“That also makes people more skeptical about this year,” she said. “If you’re requiring it next year, that probably means you really want it from me this year. It’s quite fraught and very frustrating.”

 
The Nation offers an article regarding the continuing problems West coast students are having in registering for the SAT at testing centers anywhere near their homes.

[Excerpts]

In Northern California, securing a spot to take the SAT feels like winning the lottery. Despite California State University and the University of California no longer requiring students to submit scores when applying, there is a severe scarcity of available testing sites in the Bay Area.

As a result, students are forced to make long-distance journeys to take the exam, turning an already stressful process into a logistical nightmare.

Dora Yang, a junior at Burlingame High School, found herself staying overnight in a Dallas, Texas motel, her mind racing with anxiety about the 8 AM exam the next day. Other students said they have traveled four hours to Fresno, California and six hours to Santa Barbara, California just to sit for the test.

When I attempted to sign up for the June 1 SAT, I logged on to the registration website the moment it opened. Within minutes, every seat in my county and across Northern California was already reserved. I wasn’t alone.

According to the College Board, the nonprofit organization that creates and administers the test, over 120,000 students took the SAT in California during the 2022-2023 school year. However, when 2024 sign-ups opened last spring, there were only 12 testing sites in the Bay Area, and—believe it or not—the August 24 test was fully booked across every location in the blink of an eye.

Less than half of the schools that had served as testing centers before the pandemic have since reopened, the College Board told the San Francisco Chronicle. In response, the College Board has been working to persuade those closed centers to reopen and has asked current test sites to increase seating. Last year, this effort led to 3,000 additional seats being added across seven new locations in California.

However, this year, more students are signing up for the SAT, driven by many schools reinstating their testing requirements. According to The Washington Post, after a significant drop in 2020 due to the sudden closure of test centers, the number of students taking the SAT has risen every year since, reaching 1.9 million for the class of 2023.

College Board spokesperson Holly Stepp acknowledged that another reason for the shortage of testing seats—particularly in the Bay Area and California—is that many site administrators are unwilling to oversee testing centers on weekends. Additionally, most California schools avoid administering the SAT during the school day, as some officials believe it disrupts students’ regular learning.

For the August 24 SAT testing date, a search on the College Board website revealed 123 testing sites within 100 miles of New York City, with 11 still offering available seats. Dallas had 70 sites, 22 of which still have openings. By contrast, the Bay Area had only 12 testing sites, all fully booked. The nearest available test center was 405 miles from San Francisco, placing Northern California students at a major disadvantage.