For four years, “test-optional” was the default answer when families asked whether their student needed to submit an SAT or ACT score. That answer is no longer current. Beginning with the Class of 2025 and accelerating through this admissions cycle, a wave of selective universities — including MIT, Yale, Dartmouth, Brown, Harvard, Caltech, Stanford, and the University of Texas system — have either reinstated standardized testing requirements or strongly encouraged scores. The post-pandemic experiment is winding down.
Why the reversal
The schools that have moved away from test-optional policies share a common rationale: their internal data showed that standardized tests, when read in context, helped them identify students from under-resourced backgrounds who would otherwise have been overlooked. A strong SAT or ACT score from a student attending a high school with no AP offerings carried real signal — and removing it disadvantaged exactly the students test-optional was meant to protect.
What this means in practice
Test-optional is not gone. Many excellent universities — including most of the UC system, the University of Chicago, and a long list of liberal arts colleges — remain firmly test-optional or test-blind. But for any student targeting a top-30 research university, the working assumption should now be that a score will be expected, not optional.
What families should do now
Start testing earlier. Sophomore PSAT and a diagnostic SAT or ACT in the spring of 10th grade give students two clean junior-year sittings to improve. Don’t wait until senior fall to discover your score is below a target school’s median. And remember: a strong score at a test-optional school is still a positive submission. The decision is no longer whether to test — it is how to test well, early enough to use the result strategically.
