Test Optional Admissions

Students and teachers adjust to test-optional policy

By Jacky Li

The pressure and anxiety of bubbling SAT answer sheets against the clock is no longer a reality for students like junior Keira Tan. She wanted to prioritize her AP classes and planned on attending community college, which places less emphasis on standardized testing.

“I feel great, honestly. I thought I was gonna have to take and fail it, because it’s mostly math, writing and reading and I’m not particularly the best [student],” Tan said.

In the wake of the pandemic, many colleges across the country have gone test-optional, meaning that submitting test scores are not required as a part of a student’s application. This policy is expected to last through at least 2024. In addition, some colleges are test blind, meaning that they do not factor in the scores at all in their decisions for who gets accepted. Beginning May of 2021, the University of California (UC) system now no longer considers the standardized test scores of students in their admission process at all.

College and Career specialist Cece Adams explained that one of the reasons that many colleges are putting less emphasis on the test, is that they’re aiming for a more holistic approach to their decisions by also weighing other factors of a student other than test scores. Adams views this change positively; it makes the college admissions process more fair regardless of how much funding a school gets.

“I think it’s a little bit inequitable, in my opinion…A high end school that has the… money to put into their programs can get [their] students ready [for the test]… If you go to a school like ours where we don’t have that, it eliminates you from being competitive [test score wise],” said Adams. 2020 data from the California Department of Education recorded SAT results from every school in the state and recorded the percentage of test takers that achieved the state’s benchmark scores (see table). For AHS, 59.79% of the test takers met those targets. By comparison, schools in more affluent neighborhoods do much better on the SAT. In Monte Vista High, located in Silicon Valley, 96.93% of their students that took the test met those targets.

Math teacher Toby Jaw, who primarily teaches Math 3, recognizes the limitations of the SAT. However, math concepts that Jaw enjoyed teaching, like angles and areas of polygons for instance, have become less important in the current curriculum. Without the SAT, he has noted that the math department has focused less on these skills in earlier levels of math and are taught in later years. He acknowledges that in these times, tackling those skills may not be as important to students, particularly with the development of new technologies and programs that eliminate the need to memorize an array of formulas and concepts for real world applications.

“I think [those skills] are deemphasized which…makes me sad, but…when you look at the big picture, how much of those specific topics do you need to know really well in order to be successful in [topics] like calculus or engineering? There are newer technologies… for people to figure out areas of things, [and] times change,” said Jaw.

Even though the test’s importance is diminishing, some still choose to take it. Senior Carlos Taluban took the SAT in May, but retook the SAT in December in order to improve his score. He was under the impression that some of the colleges he was applying to, like Stanford, still required SAT scores. Taluban later found out that Stanford, like many other colleges, made submitting test scores optional. Nonetheless, he took the test anyway because he had already paid for the test, both in terms of fees and the time spent studying for it.

“I still studied, but more so from the feeling of a sunk cost fallacy than from serious determination. I already paid, and it’d be a waste to pay that late fee for canceling. If I don’t score high then it’s whatever, but if I end up scoring high then it’s a win for me.” said Taluban.

In the end, this new policy allows students to have the freedom to make their own decision on whether or not to take the test. Although the test is not perfect, students that are confident in their language and math skills can choose to take it and submit their scores if they’re satisfied with their results. Students that don’t take the test have one less thing to worry about among all of the obstacles and stressors of the later high school years, and can focus more on their classes and their lives after high school.

“It allows students to be more like a student, and have a great senior year, than be stressed out about one more thing on their plate,” said Adams.

Illustration by Eden Buell