The debate over standardized testing in college admissions has become increasingly polarized.
Critics argue that exams like the SAT and ACT undermine equity and add little predictive value, while proponents contend that removing them has created new problems—especially for public universities tasked with serving large, diverse student populations. Recent experience suggests that the latter concern deserves renewed attention.
Opponents of standardized testing often emphasize that high school GPA is a better predictor of college success than test scores. This claim is broadly supported by research showing that grades capture long-term effort, persistence, and classroom performance. They also argue that standardized tests disadvantage students from low-income backgrounds, who may lack access to test preparation resources, and that public universities—unlike elite private institutions—should prioritize access and social mobility over selective sorting.
These concerns are serious and cannot be dismissed. Yet the growing movement toward test-free admissions at public universities has revealed significant unintended consequences, particularly when standardized tests are removed without equally rigorous alternative measures of academic readiness.
The experience of the University of California system is instructive. Since eliminating SAT and ACT requirements, UC campuses have reported a sharp rise in underprepared students—most notably in mathematics. Faculty now encounter incoming students who struggle with material well below college level, forcing institutions to expand remedial instruction and divert resources away from advanced coursework. This raises an uncomfortable question: if public universities cannot reliably assess academic readiness at admission, who bears the cost of that uncertainty?
Standardized tests, for all their flaws, serve several essential functions that grades alone cannot fully replace.
First, they provide a common academic benchmark across high schools with widely varying grading standards. Grade inflation is real, uneven, and accelerating. An A in one high school may represent mastery of advanced material; in another, it may reflect generous grading policies or limited course rigor. Standardized tests help admissions officers interpret GPAs in context, especially at large public universities reviewing tens of thousands of applications.
Second, standardized tests can act as early warning signals. They are not perfect predictors of college success, but they often reveal gaps in foundational skills—particularly in quantitative reasoning and reading comprehension—that GPAs may obscure. Identifying these gaps before enrollment allows universities to place students appropriately, offer targeted support, or guide students toward institutions better matched to their preparation.
Third, eliminating tests can unintentionally increase subjectivity in admissions. When test scores disappear, greater weight falls on essays, extracurriculars, and recommendations—components that often favor students with access to professional advising, polished editing, and well-resourced schools. In this sense, standardized tests can counterbalance, rather than exacerbate, inequality by offering a transparent, uniform data point available to all applicants.
Fourth, standardized tests can support upward mobility for high-achieving students from under-resourced schools. For these students, strong test performance may be one of the few ways to signal academic potential beyond what their school context allows. Removing tests risks narrowing, rather than widening, pathways for such applicants.
None of this suggests that standardized tests should dominate admissions decisions or be treated as measures of intelligence or worth. The mistake of the past was not using tests, but overusing them. The mistake of the present may be abandoning them entirely.
Public universities face a dual responsibility: expanding access while ensuring students are prepared to succeed once admitted. Admissions policies that ignore academic readiness do not promote equity—they postpone its costs, often onto the very students they aim to help.
A more balanced approach is needed.
Requiring standardized tests as one component of a holistic review—while contextualizing scores by opportunity, improving preparation resources, and avoiding rigid cutoffs—can restore an important safeguard without reviving the excesses of test-centric admissions. In fact, the Senate Administration Workgroup on Admissions at the University of California, San Diego has called for a return to standardized testing:
“This recommendation follows directly from the findings in this report that high school math grades are only very weakly linked to students’ actual math preparation. In fact, for more than two decades the Mathematics Department has found that out of all available student data, the single best predictor for math placement has been the SAT (math section) score, with the ACT score being an equally good predictor. The Math department still uses these scores as the best predictor for math placement if the student provides this data after they are admitted.”