Dartmouth is one of multiple colleges and universities, including Harvard, that have brought back the requirement that applicants submit an SAT or ACT score with their application. A new study by Dartmouth researchers found that the school’s test-optional policy may have had the opposite effect as it intended.
Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, many colleges and universities stopped asking applicants to submit test scores due to the difficulty of accessing in-person testing sites. Likewise, the schools pointed to research showing that more economically well-off students were likelier to succeed on the tests.
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However, the Dartmouth study found that the tests predicted academic success at the school and that lower-income students who did well on the SAT or ACT were less likely to submit high scores, hurting their chances of admission.
The researchers say that admissions officers are more likely to pick a lower-income applicant above a certain score.
“We see that for SAT scores above 1350, less advantaged students have a significantly higher probability of admissions conditional on test score,” the paper states. “This is because Admissions Offices use SAT scores within context.”
But the study only looked at one school –– Dartmouth.
Previous research across the college application landscape found that the number of high-scoring, lower-income students is a fairly small sample size.
Research released in 2023 by economists at Harvard’s Opportunity Insights found that just 2.4% of SAT takers from the bottom 20% of households by income scored at least 1300.
That rate jumps for students from better economic circumstances. Roughly 1 in every 6 students from the top 20% of households scores at least a 1300.
Nearly one-third of students from the top 1% of households by income score a 1300 or higher.
The two studies together suggest that standardized tests as a whole could skew toward students from the wealthiest backgrounds but that students from lower-income backgrounds with high scores benefit from having them alongside their college applications.
