The University of Texas at Austin announced Monday it would reinstate its standardized testing requirement for admissions after test-optional students’ academic achievement suffered.
UT Austin became the latest school to reinstate the SAT or ACT testing requirements suspended in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic due to “limited testing availability.” All students applying for the 2025 fall semester will be required to submit test scores.
“Our goals are to attract the best and brightest students and to make sure every student is successful once they are here,” university President Jay Hartzell said in a press release. “Standardized scores combined with high school GPA support this goal by improving early identification of students who demonstrated the greatest academic achievement, the most potential, and those who can most benefit from support through our student success programs. Our experience during the test-optional period reinforced that standardized testing is a valuable tool for deciding who is admitted and making sure those students are placed in majors that are the best fit.”
The school joins the likes of Dartmouth College, Yale University, Georgetown University, Brown University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Purdue University in reinstating the requirement. Some universities stopped requiring applicants to submit their standardized test scores in recent years over concerns about racial equity.
In a press release announcing the decision, UT Austin offered statistics comparing the academic performance of test-optional students with those who chose to submit their tests, noting somewhat anemic academic achievement among students whose SAT or ACT scores were not considered for admissions.
Data from UT Austin shows the students who chose to take a standardized test and include it for consideration in their application both tended to perform better on the exams themselves and in their first semester of college.
Students who opted in to submitting test scores performed nearly 300 points better on the SAT, showing a median of 1420 compared to the opt-out median of 1160. Similarly, students who chose to opt in had an average GPA 0.86 points higher in their first fall semester than opt-out students. Opt-in students were also 55% less likely to have a GPA of less than 2.0 in their first fall semester.
“The University has also demonstrated that knowledge of standardized test scores contributes to higher graduation rates,” the university said. “The University will continue to conduct a holistic review and will consider standardized test scores and other performance metrics in light of each applicant’s background, including the strength and rigor of their high school.”
UT Austin also announced several other admissions changes, including a new early action program, a waitlist, and encouraging letters of recommendation from sources outside an applicant’s high school. In addition, the school said it is modifying the required essay to “provide greater flexibility in topic choice and enable students to leverage responses used on other applications, while expanding opportunity for a more personalized response.”
Despite citing the pandemic, UT Austin’s removal of the requirement after 2020 came as a growing number of schools made similar moves, with many calling standardized testing racist.
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In a 2021 article in NEA Today, a publication of the nation’s largest teachers union, the National Education Association, critical race theorist Ibram X. Kendi is quoted as saying, “We still think there’s something wrong with the kids rather than recognizing [there’s] something wrong with the tests.”
“Standardized tests have become the most effective racist weapon ever devised to objectively degrade Black and Brown minds and legally exclude their bodies from prestigious schools,” Kendi said, according to the article.
“Since their inception almost a century ago, the tests have been instruments of racism and a biased system,” the NEA article argued. “Decades of research demonstrate that Black, Latin(o/a/x), and Native students, as well as students from some Asian groups, experience bias from standardized tests administered from early childhood through college.”