The University of Texas at Austin is once again requiring applicants to submit SAT or ACT scores, the university announced Monday.
When the pandemic closed testing centers in 2020, hundreds of colleges went test-optional or test-free. UT-Austin chose test-optional. Now, several institutions are announcing permanent decisions about their SAT policies. In recent weeks, Brown, Dartmouth, and Yale announced they were returning to requiring the tests. The University of Michigan declared it would stay test-optional. And boards for the University of North Carolina system and University System of Georgia aim to make final decisions later this spring, their spokespeople say.
At UT-Austin, leaders said they wanted test scores to help them better predict how students will do at the university. Those predictions, in turn, help administrators identify who should not be admitted (at least not right away) into more-demanding programs such as engineering and business; who should be offered additional academic support; and who is scoring highly in the context of their high school, even if their score is not impressive when compared with national or UT-Austin averages.
“What’s important for us is to be able to analyze students,” Miguel V. Wasielewski, vice provost for admissions, told The Chronicle.
Standardized-test opponents often argue that test requirements discourage underrepresented minority students from applying, but UT-Austin’s leaders don’t think that will happen at the university. The College Board shared data with the university showing that 90 percent of applicants took the SAT, whether or not they submitted scores. That suggested that taking the test was not a “barrier,” Jay Hartzell, the university president, said during a news conference.
Meanwhile, test scores are important to making student-success predictions because many applicants have similar GPAs, Wasielewski said. Test scores can help differentiate between them: In the applicant pool for fall 2024, 42 percent of about 73,000 freshman applicants submitted test scores, according to the university. Score submitters tended to have higher scores than score withholders, and their average GPA after their first term at UT-Austin was 0.86 of a point higher than that of nonsubmitters, according to the university.
There is one major twist, however, that makes UT-Austin’s circumstances different from other, high-profile score-requiring colleges. By law, the university must extend 75 percent of its in-state admissions offers to the top-ranked graduates in each of the high schools across the state. Ninety percent of the enrolled class must be in-state. So in some ways, UT-Austin has a “different problem to solve” than Brown or Yale, Hartzell said. For many first-year admitted students to the university, test scores are used to help determine whether they’ll get a direct line into their first-choice major and whether they’re referred to scholarships and academic support, not whether they’ll get in at all.
There are no score cutoffs for admissions, either into the university or into majors, Wasielewski said. UT-Austin admissions readers look first at statistics about applicants’ high schools and take into account whether applicants’ scores and grades are strong compared with their peers’. “We understand that not all 1300 SAT scores are the same when you think about where students have come from and their preparedness,” Hartzell said.
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