Why Test-Optional College Admissions Didn't Last

Most schools are now test optional. That was the state of American college admissions as Mrs. Jen, the college counselor at the International Community School of Bangkok, described it on a 2022 episode of the school's student-produced podcast, Students Incorporated. It was true when she said it. It has not stayed true. In the years since, a run of the most selective universities in the country, the same names that show up on ICS Bangkok seniors' application lists every fall, have quietly walked test-optional policy back, reviving the SAT and ACT as a requirement rather than a suggestion.

Mrs. Jen made her comments alongside two student co-hosts, Lion and Ronnie, and a guest who embodied the stakes of the conversation better than any counselor could: Proud, an ICS Bangkok senior deep in her own application cycle, juggling early-decision essays, a self-designed dementia research project, and two service organizations she'd founded. Her presence on the episode wasn't incidental. It's a useful reminder of what "holistic review" was already supposed to mean, right as the debate over how much a test score should count was about to reopen.

What "Optional" Meant in 2022

The pandemic had pushed the vast majority of U.S. colleges to drop SAT and ACT requirements starting in 2020, when shuttered testing centers made scores impossible for many students to get. By the time Mrs. Jen was recording that episode, test-optional had hardened into the assumed default rather than an emergency measure. "We say that colleges look at a holistic review of applicants," she explained, describing a process that weighed activities, recommendation letters, and essays alongside, not narrowly beneath, grades and test scores.

She walked her students through what she called the four P's of choosing a school: price (whether it fits the family budget), program (whether it offers the intended major), place (the country, city, and region), and people (the alumni and community a student can actually connect with). Notably absent from that framework, by design, was any single number. Test scores, when submitted at all, were framed as one data point among many. Mrs. Jen relayed a line she'd heard from a visiting Notre Dame admissions officer that captured the era's thinking exactly.

The SAT represents four hours of a student's work, whereas a GPA represents four years.

That was the working consensus in the fall of 2022: a four-hour test shouldn't outweigh four years of transcripts. It didn't hold.

The Reversal, School by School

The unwinding started in February 2024, when Dartmouth's president announced the college was reinstating its testing requirement, citing an internal study finding that SAT and ACT scores explained roughly 22% of the variation in students' first-year GPA, a stronger predictor, on its own, than most other single factors admissions officers had leaned on during the test-optional years. Dartmouth's announcement cited broader research as well, pointing to work by economists Raj Chetty, David Deming, and John Friedman using detailed admissions data from Ivy-Plus institutions, which found that test scores also predicted longer-run outcomes like earnings and admission to elite graduate programs, even after accounting for family income.

Yale and Harvard followed within months, both requiring scores again for students entering in 2025. Brown, Caltech, Cornell, and Georgetown made the same move. Princeton announced in October 2025 that it would require scores starting with the 2027-28 cycle, and Columbia set the same reinstatement for fall 2027 applicants. By 2026, according to admissions-consulting firm Crimson Education, eleven of the top fifteen ranked universities in the country had returned to some form of test-required policy, including several, like Carnegie Mellon, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, and Penn, that have announced phase-outs of test-optional admissions even if they haven't fully reinstated requirements yet.

The reinstatement hasn't stayed confined to private research universities, either. Public flagships have moved the same direction: the University of Texas at Austin brought back its testing requirement in 2024, the University of Florida now requires SAT, ACT, or CLT scores from every applicant, and the entire Florida and Georgia public university systems reinstated testing across the board. Georgia's board of regents voted in 2024 to phase testing requirements back in at four of its research institutions, including Georgia State and Kennesaw State, by 2026.

That reversal is real but narrow in scope. More than 2,000 four-year U.S. institutions remain test-optional or test-free, and by most counts over 90% of ranked colleges nationally kept that policy for 2026 admissions. The shift is concentrated almost entirely at the most selective tier, which happens to be exactly the tier ICS Bangkok seniors chase. A counselor telling students in 2022 that scores were optional everywhere was accurate. A counselor repeating that same line to this year's seniors, about Dartmouth or Yale or Brown, would be giving them outdated advice.

Mrs. Jen also told her co-hosts that the U.S. had "over 4,000 universities" for students to choose from, a scale claim that undersold it slightly, if anything. The National Center for Education Statistics counted roughly 5,600 to 5,900 Title IV-eligible postsecondary institutions nationwide in the 2024-25 academic year, of which about 2,600 award bachelor's degrees or higher. The sheer size of that list is part of why the four P's framework existed: with thousands of options and a shrinking handful still requiring a test score, "which four or five actually fit" was always a harder question than "did I hit a number."

A Harder Map Than the Four P's Assumed

The "place" leg of Mrs. Jen's four P's has also gotten more complicated since the episode aired. She noted on the show that ICS Bangkok students were applying to universities in as many as ten different countries, evidence, she said, of how much more mobile and competitive the field had become compared to her own three degrees, earned at a small Indiana liberal arts college, a large public university in Tennessee, and an online counseling program through UC San Diego.

That international mobility hasn't kept expanding in a straight line. Common App data released this year showed international applicant volume fell 9% in the 2025-26 cycle even as domestic applications kept climbing, with the steepest declines coming from Asia and Africa. Reporting from Inside Higher Ed and Forbes tied the drop to visa uncertainty and other federal actions that have made American schools a riskier bet for international families, a real shift in the calculus for students at a school like ICS Bangkok, where "place" has always meant choosing among several countries, not just several schools within one.

What Didn't Change

For all that's shifted around the edges of the process, the episode's most durable advice wasn't about scores or geography at all. Mrs. Jen urged underclassmen to build what she called a college team: parents, but also teachers, coaches, and counselors who know them well enough to advocate for them on paper. Proud's own application file was less a counterargument to standardized testing than a demonstration of what a holistic file was supposed to reward: a research placement she'd cold-emailed her way into at a Thai university, testing whether a soybean-derived compound could support neuron density in ways relevant to dementia, after watching the disease take her grandfather; a campus chapter of the Society of Women Engineers she'd founded to push back on being one of two girls in her AP Computer Science class; and an anti-colorism campaign, partnered with a Bangkok skincare brand, that had placed awareness stickers in more than 100 stores across Thailand by the time she taped the episode.

None of that shows up on an SAT score sheet, reinstated or not. That was the point Mrs. Jen kept circling back to: a test represents a few hours, and everything else a student brings represents years. The reinstated testing requirements complicate that pitch without discrediting it: scores are back on the file at a growing list of elite schools, but they're back as one line among many, not the whole page. What changed since 2022 isn't the value of the years Proud spent building a research relationship or starting a campaign. It's that the four-hour test she also had to plan for is, at more of her target schools than her counselor could have predicted, no longer optional.

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