When most selective U.S. universities dropped standardized testing requirements in 2020, administrators described it as an emergency measure — a pandemic-era accommodation, not a permanent policy shift. Six years later, a majority of those same institutions remain test-optional, and a handful have gone further, dropping essays, interviews, and even letters of recommendation from their standard review.
The stated rationale for going test-optional was equity: standardized test scores correlate strongly with family income, and removing them was meant to widen access for lower-income applicants. The actual effect, according to admissions data compiled across sixty selective institutions by the Higher Education Access Project, has been more complicated. Application volume from lower-income students did increase — but so did applications overall, at nearly every income bracket, diluting acceptance rates across the board and making the admissions process, by several measures, more opaque rather than less.
What has changed most is not who applies but how admissions offices decide. Without a test score to anchor comparisons, several major universities have shifted weight toward extracurricular narrative and essay quality — categories far more susceptible to paid coaching and parental editing than a standardized test ever was. A 2025 investigation found that admissions essay consulting, an industry barely regulated and heavily concentrated among wealthy families, grew by an estimated 40 percent in the three years after test-optional policies took hold.
"We removed one biased gatekeeper and didn't fully reckon with what would fill the gap," said Renata Osei, a former admissions officer at a mid-Atlantic research university who now consults on equity in enrollment policy. "Essays aren't neutral. They reward fluency and polish, and those things are unevenly distributed by the same socioeconomic lines the test scores were."
"We removed one biased gatekeeper and didn't fully reckon with what would fill the gap."
A newer round of changes is now underway in response. A cluster of universities, led by several in the University of California system, are experimenting with "context-adjusted" review — evaluating essays and activities relative to what was actually available to an applicant at their specific school, rather than against a universal standard. Early data is promising but limited, and the approach requires significantly more staff time per application, a cost most public universities can't easily absorb at scale.
Meanwhile, a smaller but vocal group of institutions has reversed course entirely and reinstated testing requirements, arguing — controversially — that a standardized score, whatever its flaws, is at least equally standardized across applicants in a way a coached essay is not. Dartmouth's 2024 reinstatement, and the data it published alongside the decision, has become a reference point on both sides of an argument that shows no sign of resolving before the next admissions cycle begins.
What's clear, six years into what was billed as a temporary emergency policy, is that there is no neutral admissions criterion waiting to be discovered — only different ways of distributing advantage, each with a constituency arguing it's the fairest one yet.
