The University of Pennsylvania reinstated its standardized testing requirement beginning with the 2025-26 admissions cycle, per its admissions announcements, joining Harvard, Yale, Stanford, MIT and other selective institutions that restored score requirements after the pandemic-era test-optional wave. Yale had announced its reversal in February 2024, per Reuters. The countervailing fact: per FairTest, more than 80% of U.S. four-year colleges and universities still do not require ACT or SAT scores for admission, and over 2,000 institutions remain test-optional or test-blind.
So the real story is not a national reversal but a widening split at the top of the selectivity distribution. Princeton, per its admissions site, remains test-optional for the 2026-27 cycle, which shows even within the Ivy League the policy is settled at some schools and contested at others.
Why are selective colleges bringing tests back?
The stated reasons follow a pattern in institutional announcements: test scores, admissions officers argue, help identify high-achieving students from under-resourced high schools whose grades alone understate them, and research from peer institutions after reinstatement reported application pools that were more, not less, diverse. Critics respond that testing correlates with family income and that scores add least information for the most privileged applicants.
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What does the split mean for applicants?
For the class applying in 2026, the practical rule is per-school verification, because policies differ not only across institutions but across cycles. Some schools that require scores allow AP or IB scores as alternatives; others are fully test-required with no substitutions. Applicants to the 2,000-plus test-optional institutions face the older question of whether submitting a strong score helps at the margin, which most admissions offices say it can, based on their own published guidance.
What would settle the debate?
The decisive evidence will come from the institutions that reversed early: several admission cycles of data on who applies, who enrolls and how they perform. If class composition and first-year outcomes hold steady or improve at test-required schools, more institutions will follow; if low-income application rates drop, the pendulum could swing back toward optionality. Watch for those institutional research reports rather than for the next single-school announcement.
