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Harvard University plans to reinstate the SAT or ACT as admissions requirements, with some of its Ivy League peers returning to standardized test scores after a pause caused by the pandemic.
The new policy will apply to students seeking admission in the fall of 2025, Harvard said in a statement Thursday, walking away from its earlier decision to make the test optional for several more years.
Harvard’s change underscores a broader rethink about standardized tests at elite schools, which are evaluating the best ways to admit students from all backgrounds after the Supreme Court ruled last June that they should consider race in admissions. can not do. Dartmouth, Yale and Brown all recently said they would bring back the test, saying it could give admissions officers more context about whether less-privileged applicants are likely to succeed at the schools.
“Fundamentally, we know that talent is universal, but opportunity is not,” Hoppy Hoekstra, dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, said in the statement. “With this change, we hope to strengthen our ability to identify these promising students and give Harvard the opportunity to support their development as thinkers and leaders who will contribute to shaping our world. ”
Harvard’s neighbor the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge reinstated testing requirements two years ago. The University of Pennsylvania retained its test-optional policy for the following year.
Testing opponents have long argued that the requirement favors wealthier students who can afford tuition and preparation courses. When testing centers were closed at the peak of the pandemic, prestigious colleges started bypassing the test.
However, since then, some of the most elite American schools have become concerned that not using tests has made it harder to identify gifted students from less privileged backgrounds. A report last year from Harvard professors, including economist Raj Chetty, found that standardized tests were important in identifying those students.
“SAT/ACT scores and academic credentials are highly predictive of post-college success,” they said in the study.
The Harvard Crimson first reported the school’s decision on testing.
Harvard, America’s oldest and richest college, said in a statement that test scores are considered along with other information about applicants’ experience, skills, talents and contributions to their communities. The school also assesses applicants’ academic ability relative to high school students. Yale, when reinstating the test, said the scores could help establish a student’s academic readiness for college-level work.
Yale, MIT and Harvard are among the schools that are increasing efforts to recruit students from rural backgrounds, who typically have not applied to elite colleges. Having test scores tells colleges more context about an applicant than their high school peers. Harvard said in December that students from rural communities and small towns made up 10% of the students accepted so far.
Harvard is bringing back testing requirements as it grapples with changes in the recruiting landscape. The school said last month that 54,008 students had sought admission for next autumn’s first class. This was the second consecutive year that graduate applications declined. They are down from 61,220 two years ago, a spike that was helped by the elimination of testing requirements.
This article was generated from an automated news agency feed without any modifications to the text.
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