Stanford Goes Back to Testing

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

In a turnabout, Stanford University announced Friday that it will again require undergraduate applicants to submit an admissions exam — either the SAT or the ACT — beginning with students entering in fall 2026. Stanford stopped requiring the exam in 2020, as did hundreds of colleges across the country as the escalating pandemic made it difficult for applicants to take the test. Many campuses, including Stanford, said they would reevaluate the new SAT-free system at some point.

Other highly competitive schools have already begun bringing back the admissions requirements, including Harvard and the California Institute of Technology, which announced the change this year. Yale is also bringing back the admissions exams, but it will allow students to submit advanced placement tests or International Baccalaureate exam results in lieu of the SAT or ACT...

Stanford’s pause of the admissions tests also coincided with a national backlash against the tests that had already begun, including at the University of California, where low-income students of color won a lawsuit against UC in 2020 that outlawed the tests as biased in favor of wealthier students in a variety of ways. The judge in that case also barred UC from making the tests optional. That ruling holds, four years later. 

UC “has ended use of standardized tests in freshman admissions for the foreseeable future,” Ryan King, a university spokesperson, told the Chronicle Friday, noting that the public university’s situation is different from that of elite, private universities...

Full story at https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/stanford-require-standardized-tests-admission-19503338.php.

The UC Regents, as blog readers will recall, rejected the Academic Senate's position on the use of the SAT. Hence, UC did not object to the court decision referenced above. But nothing is forever.