Yale is the second Ivy League school to reinstate the SAT as an admissions requirement in the fall of 2025.

Students can submit scores from one or all of these four tests:

• ACT
• Advanced Placement (AP)
• International Baccalaureate (IB)
• SAT

The schools dropped the requirement during the COVID pandemic.

When you have to explain, you are usually losing.

Yale wrote out this long explanation for why it must be used for admissions when it’s quite simple: It hurt kids from lower-economic backgrounds.

The longer explanation:

While evaluating all these applications, our researchers and readers found that when admissions officers reviewed applications with no scores, they placed greater weight on other parts of the application. But this shift frequently worked to the disadvantage of applicants from lower socio-economic backgrounds.

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In other high schools, high-achieving students quickly exhaust the available course offerings, leaving only two or three rigorous classes in their senior year schedule. Teachers with large classes may use positive but generic words of praise in recommendation letters. Students’ out-of-school commitments may include activities that demonstrate extraordinary leadership and contributions to family and community but reveal nothing about their academic preparedness. With no test scores to supplement these components, applications from students attending these schools may leave admissions officers with scant evidence of their readiness for Yale.

When students attending these high schools include a score with their application – even a score below Yale’s median range — they give the committee greater confidence that they are likely to achieve academic success in college.

This confidence is founded on evidence: Yale’s research from before and after the pandemic has consistently demonstrated that, among all application components, test scores are the single greatest predictor of a student’s future Yale grades. This is true even after controlling for family income and other demographic variables, and it is true for subject-based exams such as AP and IB, in addition to the ACT and SAT.

Everything these schools do is in the name of equality. But, you know, if these kids had school choice, they wouldn’t be confined to those lower performing school

Everyone takes the same standardized test.

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