The SAT and ACT are making a comeback

Yesterday, Dartmouth announced plans to start requiring SAT or ACT scores for next year’s class of applicants (aka current high school juniors), becoming the first Ivy League school to reverse its pandemic-era policy that made standardized tests optional.

Dartmouth says its decision was based on new research from the Ivy League and other highly selective schools that indicates SAT and ACT scores help to predict students’ first-year college performance better than high-school grades (similar to red/green flags in the dating world).

• Per the data, students with a perfect 4.0 GPA in high school only earned college grades that were 0.1 point higher than those with a high school GPA of 3.2.

Big picture: If dropping standardized tests is cool, consider US universities Miles Davis. Over half of America’s ~3,800 colleges have scrapped their SAT/ACT requirement dating back to the early days of the pandemic, when all testing centers were closed. Nearly all of those schools are still test-optional, with the notable exception of MIT (and now Dartmouth).

👀 Looking ahead… Despite their waning influence in college admissions, the SAT and ACT are still an important part of the US education system. A total of 17 states currently use one or both of the tests as a way of measuring school quality.