College Admissions
Test-Optional Was Never the End of Testing. The Ivies Just Made It Official.
A is now the most common grade in American high schools. Sit with that for a moment.
The average high school GPA has climbed from 2.6 in 1985 to over 3.1 today and it keeps rising, even as national measures of college readiness have moved in the opposite direction. For admissions officers at selective universities, this creates a genuine problem: a transcript full of A’s from a school that grades generously looks identical, on paper, to one from a school that doesn’t. The number stops functioning as clear evidence of anything in particular.
This is the context in which six of the eight Ivy League schools have quietly, and in most cases without much fanfare, reinstated standardized test requirements. The most recent was Yale, which announced on May 27 that it was ending its test-flexible policy and requiring the SAT or ACT specifically, a move its own data had made inevitable. In the two most recent admissions cycles, more than 80 percent of Yale applicants had submitted ACT or SAT scores anyway; by fall 2025, that figure had reached 90 percent of the entering class. The policy had become a formality in reverse: schools nominally offering flexibility while students, reading the room, submitted scores regardless.
It is not that the SAT and ACT are perfect instruments. It is that they remain the only instruments in the admissions process specifically designed to be consistent, and in a landscape where transcripts are increasingly hard to read, consistency turns out to matter quite a lot.
Harvard, Yale, Brown, Dartmouth, Cornell, and the University of Pennsylvania have all reinstated requirements or announced plans to do so. Only Columbia and Princeton remain test-optional, with Princeton’s current policy set to expire after the 2026–2027 admissions cycle.
Beyond the Ivy League, the list of schools that have returned to testing requirements includes Stanford, MIT, Johns Hopkins, Caltech, and the flagship state systems in Florida, Georgia, and Tennessee. The trend is not a trickle. It is a tide.
What makes this worth paying attention to is not just the policy change itself, but also why it happened.
Some selective admissions offices concluded that without test scores, they had fewer reliable ways to distinguish between students with a 3.9 GPA from a school that grades generously and students with a 3.9 GPA from a school that doesn’t. In a world where the transcript is increasingly hard to read, the test score remained legible.
The grade inflation problem no one wanted to name
Research by ACT found the average high school GPA increased from 3.17 in 2010 to 3.36 in 2021, while actual measures of college readiness over the same period moved in the opposite direction.
In February 2026, research presented at Harvard’s education policy center made the implications concrete. Economist Jeffrey Denning found that students who experienced more lenient grading were less likely to pass subsequent courses, scored lower on standardized tests, were less likely to graduate, and earned significantly less over their lifetimes than students whose grades had meant something. The A on the transcript, in other words, can be a false signal, for the student receiving it as much as for the admissions officer reading it.
The same concern is showing up beyond admissions. A 2024 survey reported that many employers are skeptical of recent graduates’ workplace readiness: 75 percent of employers said some or all of the recent graduates they hired were unsatisfactory, and 60 percent said they had fired at least one recent graduate hired that year. Separately, admissions offices have also returned to standardized testing after concluding that transcripts alone do not always provide enough comparative evidence. Yale, for example, said its internal research found that test scores remained the single strongest predictor of performance in Yale courses. In an era of rising grades and increasingly similar transcripts, standardized scores remain one of the few application metrics produced under common testing conditions.
This is the argument Harvard made when it reinstated testing requirements. It is the argument Dartmouth made two years before that, when its own internal data showed that high test scores predicted college success even for students from disadvantaged backgrounds, a finding that directly challenged the progressive case for test-optional policies.
What this means in practice
The more immediate consequence for families is strategic. Test-optional still appears on more than 90 percent of four-year college websites, which can create a misleading picture. The data tells a different story: test submission rates are up 10 to 11 percent year over year, even at schools that have not formally reinstated requirements. Students are submitting scores because they understand, correctly, that a strong score helps — and that at highly selective schools, the absence of a score may now raise a question rather than answer one.
There is also the scholarship question, which tends to get lost in conversations about admission. Many colleges that remain test-optional for admission purposes still use standardized test scores to determine merit awards, honors college eligibility, or admission into selective academic programs within the university. The decision not to take the SAT or ACT may cost a student nothing at the admissions stage and thousands of dollars, or access to valuable academic opportunities, at the enrollment stage.
The two conversations are distinct, and families conflate them at a real cost.
The ACT’s quiet reinvention
One piece of this story that has not received enough attention is the structural change to the ACT itself. The enhanced ACT, which began rolling out nationally in 2025 and transitioned school-day testing in spring 2026, is a meaningfully different test from the one most prep resources still describe.
The test is now approximately two hours rather than three. The Science section, long the ACT’s most distinctive feature, is now optional; students who choose to take it receive a separate Science score and a STEM composite, but Science no longer factors into the overall 36-point composite. That composite is now the average of English, Math, and Reading. Passages in both English and Reading are shorter, and the number of answer choices in Math has been reduced from five to four.
For students who avoided the ACT because of the Science section, found the old test’s length exhausting, or simply prefer working on paper, the enhanced ACT is worth a serious look. In a testing landscape increasingly dominated by digital exams, the ACT’s continued paper option matters. For some students, especially those who prefer annotating on paper or who find screen-based testing draining, the enhanced ACT may be a better fit than the digital SAT.
Click to read our full report on the new ACT design.
The larger point
The test-optional era was, in retrospect, a response to a specific moment, one defined by pandemic disruption, genuine questions about access and equity, and a wave of goodwill toward reducing pressure on high school students. Those concerns were not wrong. But the solution turned out to create its own problem: it removed the one metric that admissions offices could use to evaluate applicants across schools, backgrounds, and grading philosophies on equal footing.
What the Ivies are saying, in their careful, institutional way, is that they need a number that means something. And for now, that number is still the SAT or the ACT.
Families who planned their college strategy around test-optional flexibility are not in a crisis, most schools remain test-optional, and a strong application can succeed without scores at many of them. But for students aiming at the most selective schools, the calculus has shifted back. Knowing your score, having a plan to improve it, and understanding how it will be read alongside your transcript are not optional questions anymore. They are essential questions.
Share this:
