SAT and ACT Changes: Why US Colleges Are Reviving Standardized Tests – Bloomberg

US colleges relied on standardized testing to help with admissions decisions for decades. Then the Covid pandemic hit and test centers closed, making administering the ACT and SAT exams difficult. That prompted many schools, including all eight in the Ivy League, to make the tests optional. Critics of standardized testing had expressed hope that the pause would lead to a permanent rethinking of the exams, whose results have demonstrated disparities between white and nonwhite students. But in recent weeks, Ivy schools Yale University, Dartmouth College and Brown University said they were making the tests mandatory again. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced the same move in 2022. These reversals come as the exams themselves are undergoing significant changes.

The SAT, administered by the New York-based College Board, and the Iowa City-based ACT are screening tools for US college admission. Both are multiple-choice, written exams heavy on math and reading, taken by high school students typically in their junior year, sometimes senior. The SAT was created in the 1920s. Harvard University, in the early 1930s, was the first school to use the SAT as an instrument in admissions decisions, initially to determine recipients of one small scholarship program, according to Nicholas Lemann, author of The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy. The College Board, an association of educational institutions, adopted the SAT to replace a battery of essay tests during World War II, a change billed as temporary that instead proved lasting, Lemann said. College Board membership expanded greatly after the war, and the SAT became a mass-administered exam. The ACT emerged in the late 1950s as a competitor.