A long-running leftist notion about education is that standardized test scores are a poor way of assessing applicants to college. Supposedly, such tests are unfair, and high school grades are a better basis for admissions.

The University of North Carolina system inadvertently put that notion to the test. In today’s Martin Center article, Jenna Robinson explains what happened during the system’s “pandemic-era test-optional period”:

Many students who attended public high schools in North Carolina still took the ACT during their junior years, as required by North Carolina law. This set up an interesting natural experiment, since the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction collected these ACT scores from high schools and shared them with the UNC System. Therefore, we know the ACT scores of all public-university students who applied to UNC-Chapel Hill and NC State during the test-waiver period, regardless of whether they submitted those scores for use in the admissions process.

The Martin Center was able to obtain the data through a public-records request, and they confirm that ACT scores are valuable indicators of how well students will do in college. Robinson writes:

Almost certainly due to their lower academic qualifications, [students who did not submit test scores] fell behind their peers during their first semester on campus. This is what we expected based on Mismatch Theory: that students with lower standardized-test scores will receive lower grades once admitted, fall behind, become frustrated, and sometimes switch to easier majors or drop out.

Colleges and universities that care about admitting the most qualified students (as opposed to pursuing “diversity”) will use standardized test scores. Indeed, several of the Ivies have already reinstated testing requirements for admissions.