Akil Bello: Test Optional is Real
At FairTest, testing guru Akil Bello digs into the issue of test optional college admissions. Is it real, or just a PR stunt? Can your child really get into college without a magical SAT or ACT score?
A key question in examining the impact of test optional policies is how many students are actually ending up in college having not submitted scores. We’ve endeavored to answer that question by looking at the data colleges have submitted to the federal government (for college data nerds – IPEDs).
There are 6,500+ institutions that the federal government considers colleges, but for our purposes we only downloaded information on U. S. institutions that have first-time full-time students, award at least a bachelor’s degree (so this excludes many great community colleges), have an enrollment of more than 100 students, accepted at least 1 student in the last reporting cycle, and are not entirely online. Because of these parameters we ended up with data for 2,156 colleges (FYI this number varies a little year to year but this is typically the pool of colleges that FairTest uses as the universe of “colleges”).
Things have been changing steadily since 2018.
Since 2018 the percent of enrolled students submitting scores has been dropping everywhere. At the vast majority of colleges in 2018 all students submitted the ACT, the SAT, or both. In 2022 at less than 10% of colleges did all enrolled students submit scores. At about half of colleges in 2022 less than half of all enrolled students submitted any test score at all.
| % of SAT + ACT scores submitted by enrolled students | Number of institutions in 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 100% and above | 66 | 69 | 627 | 872 | 868 | |
| 75 – 99% | 170 | 211 | 357 | 291 | 305 | |
| 50 – 74% | 294 | 282 | 93 | 49 | 53 | |
| 25 – 49% | 319 | 305 | 25 | 18 | 15 | |
| 0 – 24% | 737 | 144 | 9 | 5 | 7
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