The Ivy League is once again unified in requiring all applicants to submit SAT or ACT scores to be considered for admission. During the pandemic, there was scuttlebutt that the Ivy League would move in lockstep by announcing a collective decision on testing. When Columbia announced in March 2023 that it was committing to a permanent policy of test-optional admissions, any chance of unity was shattered. Less than a year later, Dartmouth, under the leadership of President Sian Beilock, became the first Ivy League school to reinstate testing requirements in February 2024. By the summer of 2024, Yale, Brown, Harvard, and Cornell had reinstated testing requirements. Princeton and Penn reinstated testing in 2025, and with Yale’s reinstatement of an SAT/ACT requirement and Columbia’s announcement this week, the Ivy League is again unified.
The impetus for the return to testing for these institutions came out of the big data analysis conducted by Raj Chetty and his colleagues at the Opportunity Insights team at Harvard. Chetty and colleagues examined the applications and admission outcomes of 2.4 million students and specifically 486,000 students who applied to the Ivies plus Duke, Stanford, MIT and Chicago. The research outcomes were incredibly compelling in that for this group of elite schools, there was “little relationship between high school grade point average and success in college” and a robust relationship between test scores and college performance. Examining the data, Christina Paxson, president of Brown University, framed it simply: “Standardized test scores are a much better predictor of academic success than high school grades.”
As a result of the research findings, it is no surprise that every member of the Ivy League has now reinstated testing requirements. It would be surprising for any member of this group not to require standardized test scores, which remain one of the most powerful predictors of performance at these elite schools.
Every college and university must conduct analysis on its own students, determine the factors that predict success in college, and then use that information to inform admissions policies. Columbia ran the numbers after 6 years of test-optional admissions through a “multi-year faculty review” and came to the conclusion that test scores were a “useful indicator of potential student success.” Of course, they already knew this from Chetty’s research using their own admissions data. The analysis hadn’t changed, but in the summer of 2026, the admissions office finally had the political will to reverse their decision, follow the data and reinstate testing.
Every additional school that reinstates test requirements gives permission to the next school in line. Testing became so highly politicized during the pandemic that reinstating testing ensured a critical response. But the tides have been turning, and momentum is clearly swinging back towards testing as a corrective for the grade inflation taking place across American high schools. The recent revolt of the UC faculty against test-blind admissions will only accelerate the move towards reinstating testing requirements.
A unified Ivy League, requiring test scores from all applicants, eliminates the ambiguity that has plagued test score submission for years. Do I submit? Do I withhold the scores? This debate is permanently resolved. Test scores are now required to be considered for admission. And more schools will follow the lead of this group. Anticipate more selective private and public schools to reinstate test requirements in the near term.
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