The decision to move away from using standardized test scores in college applications will go down as one of the greatest follies in the history of higher education, and institutions are waking up to it.

For decades the SAT or the ACT was a nonnegotiable part of the college application process. But that all changed in 2020 when COVID canceled tests and colleges decided to move to a test-optional admissions process.

But as the pandemic receded, many institutions, including elite schools such as Harvard, Yale, and MIT, chose not to return to the old model of admissions and continued to operate on a test-optional admissions model. The reason? University leadership bought activist arguments that standardized tests are racist because, on average, certain demographics tend to do better on the SAT and ACT than others.

Instead, these institutions opted to use grade-point average as the sole marker of academic ability. And while GPA is certainly a useful tool in assessing a student’s scholarly prowess, it is much more subjective than standardized tests and there is ample evidence to suggest that many grades are inflated.

Regardless of what these universities believed about the racial disparity in SAT scores, it should be noted that it is an outrageously racist proposition to suggest that black students can’t take them simply because of the color of their skin. But, nevertheless, these institutions still endorsed this bigoted narrative, at least for a time.

But now, many of these colleges are crawling back to their pre-pandemic practice of requiring standardized test scores from applicants, and some of them quite abruptly. Yale, Dartmouth, and MIT each restored the test requirement for the class of 2029 earlier this year, and Harvard joined them this past week. In doing so, the institutions essentially admitted that the short-lived practice of test-optional admissions had led to the college admitting students who were not prepared to attend a university that required a certain degree of academic ability.

“More information, especially such strongly predictive information, is valuable for identifying talent from across the socioeconomic range,” Harvard Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Hopi Hoekstra said in a statement. “With this change, we hope to strengthen our ability to identify these promising students.”

It is an encouraging sign to see institutions once again recognize that the SAT and the ACT are useful sorting tools for determining whether or not students will succeed in college. Without the test requirement, universities placed themselves in a difficult position of having a higher dropout rate.

Dartmouth admitted as much. In their statement announcing the return of the test requirement, college President Sian Leah Beilock said, “Standardized test scores are an important predictor of a student’s success in Dartmouth’s curriculum, and this is true regardless of a student’s background or family income.”

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

This was borne out in data measuring student success. Students at the University of Texas at Austin, which restored its testing requirement last month, found that students who still submitted test scores during the test-optional period had a higher GPA than their counterparts by an average of 0.86, nearly a full letter grade.

College is not for everyone, and the standardized tests that were a staple of applications for decades helped colleges and students determine if higher education was the right path to follow. By restoring the test requirement to their admissions process, colleges and universities are eschewing the bigotry undergirding the anti-test movement and ensuring that all students follow the path most likely to maximize their individual talents and find lifelong success.