Cancelled SAT/ACT tests were a mainstay of the late spring and into the summer months this past year. Now, even as some testing sites return to operation, their capacities are greatly reduced. With the pent-up demand from students for these tests and less supply of seats, the supply and demand curve of the testing is such that many students just aren’t able to take a test. This means there are students who don’t have a test score; there are students who have a score but feel that they could do better; and there are those students who just don’t test well.
Higher education’s response to this testing dilemma has been to “become test optional.” What this phrase means is all over the place in our industry. For some, that means you can be admitted without test scores, but if you want scholarships you need to provide a test score. For others, it means that you can be “admitted” without a score, but you need to provide a score before you enroll–hence why ‘admitted’ was in quotes. There are some institutions–like Birmingham-Southern–that are taking the stand that test optional means test optional.
What does that mean?
Officially, it means “Students who apply test optional will not be disadvantaged in application or scholarship review processes.” Unofficially, it means (at least for us) that when we are reviewing students who indicate they are test optional, we will not look at test scores. We will review and make admission decisions without test scores. We will award scholarships without looking at test scores. We have gone the next step and removed all test requirements for all of our scholarship programs and academic programs. After all, “Test Optional means Test Optional.”
For some schools, being test optional is a new process. It is something that they have been “forced” to do because of the pandemic. There are a group of us that have been test optional for years–BSC since 2016–as a way of understanding that standardized tests provide a disadvantage to some students.
Want to learn more about the test optional movement? The team at fairtest.org have some great resources, as well as a searchable database of schools that are test optional.
I stand firmly by our commitment to students that being test optional means that we are truly test optional.