The past is a foreign country — and amid the turmoil of the past five years in selective college admissions, it might be easy to forget something about the so-called test optional movement. It wasn’t purely, or even mostly, altruistic on the part of colleges.

Colleges were looking to juice their rankings in the U.S. News rankings BEFORE COVID-19 hit: the black swan event just gave them an excuse to run a natural experiment. Now that several years have passed, we have more evidence than ever that there is a bimodal distribution among admitted students — and it’s important for students and their parents to understand the basics of what’s going on from the colleges’ perspective.

That was a fairly stats-heavy way to explain a trend we’re seeing in SAT (and presumably, ACT, though most sources report SAT scores with this phenomenon, so we’ll use SAT scores as a shorthand throughout this article) scores rising among students who actually submit scores. Let’s break it down:

The status quo ante — in 2019, some colleges were experimenting with test-optional

Before anyone gave a thought to social distancing, there were two competing trends in college admissions in the 2010s — many more students were taking the standardized tests, and a few colleges saw an opportunity with making these tests “optional” (in other words, students could elect to submit scores or not, not that the score would not impact your chance of getting in).

Millennials graduated high school between 1998 and 2014, with this cohort’s numbers peaking around the graduating class of 2008. (As a Millennial, I can report: taking and trying to maximize your score on the SAT and/or ACT is just what one did if one wanted to go to a selective college twenty years ago.) Interestingly, although Gen Z (young adults between 14 and 28 years old) is a much smaller cohort, the U.S. saw a huge spike in the numbers of students taking tests between 2008 and 2016, with the ACT gaining ground over the SAT over that stretch. (See the image below.)

What happened? First, many states started requiring one of these tests to graduate high school, so even non-college-bound students would sit for the tests. Second, college tuition spiked dramatically, the job market bifurcated after the Recession with much better prospects for graduates of selective colleges compared to everyone else, and the rise of fast Internet meant there was less marginal cost to applying to additional schools. So, an arms race in college admissions began, with the top-tier schools’ admissions rates falling to single digits, and the Varsity Blues scandal highlighting that some parents would go so far as to commit crimes to get their students into a “top” college.

With the college admissions situation at this much of a fever pitch, it was little wonder that there were incentives for colleges themselves to keep their prestige. At the same time, the late 2010s saw a sharp rise in discussions about fairness and inequality in many domains of American society — and the pipeline to tertiary education was no exception. Succeeding on the path to a good college and a stable adult life has always been more smooth if your family has resources and college education themselves; this isn’t surprising. But among the media, there was more and more of a sense that the “game” didn’t just reward hard work, but in some sense, was rigged.

The game resets: a global health crisis resets the chess board

So, as reported in Higher Ed Data Stories, what had been a fringe movement among a handful of small liberal arts colleges became a tsunami when an external reality hit everyone all at once — a pandemic that not only claimed the lives of one million Americans, but interrupted the education of all high school and college students at the time, and reshuffled the workplace for their teachers, parents, and students themselves.

The 2019-2020 school year gave us an overuse of the word “unprecedented,” but it’s useful to highlight that for universities and the entities that administer the ACT, SAT, and A.P. exams, that era was, to be blunt, a hot mess. Every state and school district had different policies regarding schools being open, closed, or remote, and which businesses were considered essential, a situation that persisted for years. Forty-five-minute Advanced Placement tests were thrown together in a matter of weeks. College students were sent home, stranding some students in limbo with no great options. By fall 2020, it was clear to everyone that this was no normal school year.

The college enrollment rate for 2020 was 56.5%, a 4.1 percentage point drop from 2019. This was nearly seven times the decline between 2018 and 2019. But, paradoxically, top colleges became much, much more selective. How did that happen?

Top colleges aren’t “normal” — and in the new abnormal, their stats aren’t either

Jeffrey Selingo, the author of Who Gets In and Why, is one of the best authors on the process of getting into selective colleges, and in this in-depth piece in New York magazine, he gets several stakeholders on the record about what really happened when colleges dropped the required test scores. It’s an eye-opening, worthwhile read.

The SAT serves a dual purpose in college admissions: as a sorting mechanism, and an unofficial national temperature check. What does this mean for you?

The former sorting role is straightforward, although the source of angst — majoring in mathematics at MIT is significantly more rigorous than pursuing the same track at, say, a community college. The vast majority of colleges in this country are, in fact, test optional, because they are open enrollment, period. That leaves the discussion about how much more competitive it is to get into, say, Oberlin or Occidental to a small slice of students and parents — objectively the long right-hand tail of a normal distribution. With no national curriculum, the SAT is more predictive of success in college than any other part of admissions — including grades, which inflated drastically.

In other words, matching your score to a college’s median SAT is not a guarantee of succeeding, but typically correlates with higher graduation rates and a sense that you’re on a track that is a good fit for your academic abilities.

The latter role, where test scores are looked at in the aggregate, is where self-selection bias and the quirks of admissions offices could easily lead the casual observer astray. The SAT is, in fact, a normed test: the median score will be roughly 1000 (out of the current 1600 scale) no matter what the individual raw results are.

That leads us to an interesting phenomenon: underperforming testers are, quite logically, less likely to submit their scores. (Imagine a scenario where credit scores were optional for some financial decision. People with lower scores or lower-than-expected, considering other factors, would be the population to decline to share their score, leaving the pool who DID report higher, on average. A similar phenomenon is happening here.) Voilà — at nearly every college that does report SAT scores, they went up among students that were admitted. The null responses? Not included.

Dive into the data yourself: see how your college’s scores changed

We love a data-driven analysis, and this interactive tool is super helpful for seeing how SAT scores at individual colleges, grouped by region, have increased:

This is a screengrab of the data for the schools in the Rockies region who reported scores. From BYU to CU-Boulder, the mean increased. It’s important to note gaps in these charts — each school can decide whether to report these scores; ACT equivalent scores are not included; the data are affected by regional variations (all public colleges in California, for example, are test-blind by law — a notable difference from any other region).

But still, the rule applies — it’s harder than ever to get into a very top college, and even the next level of schools are becoming more competitive due to the aforementioned forces.

At Mindspire, we believe in empowering students and their parents with information to make more informed decisions. When and how to test, and which scores to report, are ultimately up to you — but we also believe that preparing for a high-stakes admission exam has benefits beyond just raising your score to make you more competitive in the game.

Knowing what’s on the SAT (or ACT) and learning the underlying concepts will help students not only tackle first-year college work more readily, it will also give them confidence in their problem-solving abilities and critical thinking skills for the biggest challenge of all: navigating a world where the only thing constant is change.

Reach out if you would like to schedule a consultation about test prep, and don’t forget to sign up for our September 18th webinar on our college admission counseling. With this many changes in this short of a window, it’s important to go in informed.

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