If your assumption is "most selective schools are test-optional now," that was true a couple of years ago and isn't anymore. A wave of reversals since 2022 has put test scores back at the center of admissions at a lot of the most selective schools in the country -- while plenty of other schools have gone the opposite direction. The terminology matters more than ever, and it's worth getting exactly right.

What each policy actually means

  • Test-required: you must submit an SAT or ACT score to be considered. No score, no complete application.
  • Test-optional: you can submit a score if you think it helps your application. If you don't submit one, admissions officers evaluate you on everything else -- GPA, course rigor, essays, recommendations, activities -- without your absence of a score counting against you. One real exception worth knowing: some test-optional schools still require scores specifically from homeschooled applicants, since a self-reported transcript alone doesn't give them the same external benchmark it does for a traditionally-schooled applicant.
  • Test-blind (sometimes called "test-free"): the school will not look at a test score even if you send one. Submitting doesn't help, because nobody on the admissions committee ever sees it.
  • Test-flexible: a real fourth category some schools use -- Yale, for example, requires a score, but lets you choose which one to submit from a list that includes the SAT, ACT, and even AP or IB exam scores, rather than requiring specifically the SAT or ACT.

The distinction that trips people up most: test-optional and test-blind are opposites in what happens if you submit a score, not variations on the same idea. Submitting to a test-optional school can genuinely help you. Submitting to a test-blind school does nothing at all.

The landscape flipped, starting with one school

MIT was first, and by a wide margin: Dean of Admissions Stu Schmill announced on March 28, 2022 that MIT would reinstate its testing requirement for the Class of 2027, nearly two years before any Ivy League school followed. Schmill's stated reasoning: standardized tests help assess whether an applicant is prepared for MIT's math-heavy coursework, and help identify strong students from under-resourced high schools who might otherwise be overlooked.

The bigger wave came later. Dartmouth, Yale, Brown, Harvard, Cornell, Penn, and Stanford have all reinstated testing requirements for recent or upcoming admissions cycles, with most changes landing in the 2024-25 or 2025-26 cycles. Caltech, which had gone fully test-blind, reversed to test-required as well. Princeton is the most recent major name to announce a return, ending its own test-optional run with the 2027-28 admissions cycle.

The most striking reversal, though, is the University of Chicago -- the school that started the test-optional movement among elite universities in the first place, announcing it in June 2018. UChicago itself now requires test scores again, for the 2025-26 cycle (fall 2026 entry), with hardship exceptions. The pioneer of test-optional admissions no longer practices it.

Not every major school has moved the same direction. Columbia has stated its test-optional policy is permanent, making it one of the clearest elite holdouts. Yale's "test-flexible" approach is functionally a requirement, just a flexible one about which score counts.

Test-blind is its own, smaller category, and it's shrinking too. The entire University of California system (all nine undergraduate campuses) and Cal State remain test-blind as of today -- but UC's own policy is under its first real review since it went test-blind in 2020, after more than 2,300 UC faculty petitioned to bring testing back for STEM majors (see our earlier piece on that fight for the full story). Nothing has changed there yet, but "test-blind" isn't the settled, permanent category it looked like a few years ago either.

Zoom out, though, and most of higher ed hasn't moved. Well over 2,000 U.S. colleges remain test-optional -- the reversal wave is heavily concentrated among the most selective national universities, not a industry-wide trend. If you're applying to schools outside that top tier, don't assume your target schools flipped just because the Ivy League headlines did.

Why so many selective schools reversed

The reasoning driving this wave is more specific than "tests are good." Two findings, from research both Dartmouth and Princeton pointed to directly, explain most of it:

Test scores predict success at these schools, across demographic groups. Dartmouth's own internal study found SAT/ACT scores were a similarly strong predictor of academic performance for students regardless of income or background -- and Princeton's five-year review of its own test-optional data found that students who submitted scores performed academically stronger, on average, than students who didn't.

Test-optional policies were quietly hurting exactly the students they were meant to help. Research from Opportunity Insights (a Harvard-based group) found that under test-optional policies, many strong, less-advantaged applicants chose not to submit scores that would actually have helped their case -- often out of an understandable but mistaken assumption that "optional" meant "don't bother unless it's perfect." Meanwhile, removing test scores from the equation shifted more admissions weight onto other factors -- counselor recommendations, subjective "non-academic" ratings -- that research shows already skew toward wealthier applicants. The intended equity fix ended up reintroducing bias through a different door.

Why some schools are holding out

The case for staying test-optional or test-blind hasn't gone away. Standardized test performance still correlates broadly with family income and access to test prep, even if it helps identify some strong lower-income students specifically. Removing tests reduces a single high-stakes number's influence over a 17-year-old's future. And for some schools, the decision carries a political or legal dimension as much as an academic one -- California's original 2020 move to test-blind was shaped partly by a lawsuit over testing access for students with disabilities, not purely by predictive-validity research.

What this means for you

  • Check every school on your list individually, and check recently. This policy is actively changing mid-cycle at multiple schools; what was true last year for a given school may not be true for your application.

  • "Optional" isn't neutral -- read it as "submit if it helps." If your score is strong relative to your school and background, the Dartmouth/Opportunity Insights research suggests submitting is very likely the right call, more often than students assume -- see where your actual score falls against that school's range before deciding either way.

  • Test-blind means don't bother, for that school specifically. Don't spend testing budget or energy on a school that genuinely won't look at the score -- but don't assume the policy is permanent either, especially for UC schools right now.

  • Expect to submit to some schools on your list and not others. That's completely normal under mixed policies, not a sign you're doing something wrong.

  • For the mechanics of the tests themselves -- format, timing, and whether taking both actually helps -- see our SAT vs. ACT breakdown.

  • This is one step in the larger process, not a standalone task -- see the complete step-by-step guide to applying to college for how it fits with everything else, and where you are in the sequence.

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