When it comes to college admissions, COVID changed many things—some permanently, but others only temporarily. One of the biggest questions left in the wake of the pandemic is:
Do I still need to take the SAT or ACT now that many schools are “test optional”?
Wonder no more: because I dedicated a whole post to answering this question. I encourage you to read that article first before diving further into today’s: it helps you understand what “test optional” means (and DOESN’T mean), to begin with, and how such a policy affects admissions decisions. There’s some counterintuitive info in there, so it’s a good primer to check out.
Ok, finished reading that other post? Great.
In order to accurately decide if YOU, personally, can “nope” out of SAT and ACT test prep, we need to take a moment to understand what matters most in a college application overall, whether or not you’re submitting scores. That’s where I’ll kick off this post. Then, we’ll get into the question of what colleges care the most about if you decide NOT to send your scores in.
(BTW, if you’ve got test prep fatigue, I understand completely: the test optional issue might seem like yet another complex decision in a long series of complex decisions. If you don’t feel like you’ve got enough time to do this background research/thinking yourself, you can always reserve a one-on-one consultation with me. I can boil it down to YOUR best options very quickly for you.)
ARTICLE CONTENTS
1. Video version of this article
2. What matters most in a college application, generally?
3. What matters most if you're NOT submitting scores?
4. Conclusion
Watch this post as a video:
The most important parts of a college application
Inquiring minds want to know! And I’m here to enlighten you.
In college admissions, the *objective* factors that matter the most are:
Grades in general: your cumulative GPA across all the classes you’ve taken in high school.
Grades in college prep classes: your GPA in classes that are AP, IB, Honors, etc.
Academic rigor: did you take a challenging course load? An A- in AP Chem looks more impressive to admissions officers than a 100% in flower arranging.
Standardized test scores (if a college requires them): your scores on the SAT, ACT, etc.
In addition to these more numerical components above, there are a lot of subjective components that can also make an impact. How much weight a given element carries depends on the college in question.
These subjective factors also affect your chances of getting into college:
College essays: this is why your application needs an organizing principle!
Recommendation letters: flesh out the picture of who you are as a student and a person…by bringing in testimonials from instructors and mentors who know you well.
Interview: shows demonstrated interest (see next bullet point). Also, an interview helps the admissions officer in question spot obvious red flags. For instance, maybe it becomes clear over the course of the conversation that Annie Applicant didn’t actually write the Nobel-worthy essays she submitted with her application.
Demonstrated interest: did you visit the campus? Spring for an interview? Talk to the college rep? Attend an information session? Take a tour (in person or virtual)? Have you visited the college’s website? Do you open the emails you get from that school? Believe it or not, thanks to recent technology, admissions officers KNOW how often and for how long you visited their website AND if you opened the emails they sent you! (If you’ve got more questions about how to show Demonstrated Interest, I list out each and every way to do so here!)
Extracurricular activities: what do you DO with your time? Where do you exhibit PASSION and INITIATIVE? What ROLES would you fill on their campus?
Audition/Portfolio: if you’re applying to a visual arts or performance program, this is really key! Less so if you’re applying to a regular college or university, though it still shows passion and initiative.
Work experience/Internships: highlights different aspects of your character, interests, and leadership abilities.
Do standardized tests still matter?
You might be asking yourself at this point: if some colleges are willing to skip test scores all together…then does standardized testing really still matter at all in admissions? Well, as I noted above, they matter if the colleges on your list require scores.
(Almost by definition, if a school is test-optional, then testing would no longer fall among the “essential” aspects of your application!)
Here’s why many colleges still ask you to send in your scores:
GPA is a less and less meaningful metric: in 1997, the most common grade given out was a B. 20 years later, in 2017, it was an A. (Yes, A is the new B.) And almost a decade later, today, a LOT of applicants have 4.0 GPAs! In other words, grade inflation has made it trickier for admissions offices to differentiate between the many, many high schoolers who routinely earn A grades. That’s where standardized testing comes in.
Tests help to roughly sort applications—or at least eliminate some from the pile: if you talk to kids at high schools outside your own, you may have realized that not all high schools and school systems are equivalently challenging, rigorous, and well-resourced. That means an “A” at high school 1 might mean something very different from an “A” at high school 2, in terms of a student’s preparedness for college. Imagine an admissions officer who’s trying to compare an applicant with a 4.0 from an academically intense college preparatory high school….to someone with a 4.0 from a public high school in rural Oklahoma. (Not that there’s anything wrong with Oklahoma! There just might be different resources and grading standards at those two schools.)
Test scores are comparable over the years: the percentile you earn on a standardized test is linked to a certain score. A 29 on the ACT today will be the same percentile as a 29 on the ACT taken a few years from now.
Which factors have the most weight if you're NOT submitting scores?
Take another look at that first list (objective factors) of the most impactful admissions components from earlier. If you plan to take “Test Scores” out of the self-portrait you’re presenting to colleges, you’d better be sure that every other element of your application is EXCELLENT. Given what I explained in the sister post about the impact of test-optional policies on admissions, it really needs to be true that your SAT or ACT score was the ONLY weak point of your application.
That might be you if: you took 5 AP classes your junior year, got 4’s and 5’s on all of the associated exams, earned only As and A+s in your coursework—AND medaled in local and state gymnastics competitions…AND win prizes every year on the debate team. AND help run a guinea pig sanctuary in your spare time, when you’re not teaching yourself Japanese pottery, which you sell online to gain small business experience. AND you’re the kind of introspective, emotionally intelligent, genuine, socially-conscious person that all your teachers and classmates feel positively about (and are likely to write a positive rec letter about).
In other words, you need to ask yourself, “Is there something(s) so above-and-beyond about me that this college would be willing to LOWER THEIR AVERAGE SCORES to admit me into their doors?” (Because remember from that post I’ve sent you back to a couple of times already? “Test optional” policies RAISE the average scores of admitted students…which colleges LOVE.)
If you find yourself recognizing yourself in all of what I just wrote, and can quite honestly say that, yes, everything else about you and your application package IS, indeed, standout—that a college WOULD admit you despite your slightly lowering their stats—then congrats, friend: YOU ARE the ideal kind of person to embrace their “test optional” policy and NOT submit your scores.
If, on the other hand, everything else in your transcript and application WOULDN’T be enough to get you in, then withholding your SAT or ACT score won’t save you. In fact, you might need to put the prep time in and take the test precisely to improve your odds of of getting in!
Conclusion
Now that you know how schools going “test optional” impacts the admissions process, and now that you’ve had a moment to think through how YOUR application will measure up in that landscape, you might have developed a gut feeling about what’s going to be best for you.
If that “gut feeling” is a strong one, then that’s great! Even if it means that you still need to study for and take the tests, you’re further along than where you were before you read this post. You KNOW what you have to do, so now you can quit stressing about WHAT to do and get busy DOING it.
But if you’re still not feeling very certain, don’t worry: I’ve got yet another post that walks you through my very concrete method for making this choice. It shows you how to find a given college’s average test scores, and how that info makes the “test optional” decision FOR you!
And as ever, if it all begins to feel overwhelming, reach out and let me take the big-picture thinking out of your hands so that you can focus on actually writing and putting together your application.
