Study Abroad: Yale University to bring back SAT, ACT for UG admission

NEW DELHI: Yale University has announced to bring back Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT) and American College Testing (ACT) as the eligibility criteria for undergraduate admission. The university will accept standardised test scores for admission from year 2025 for UG courses.

The university will begin the change in the fall and will also accept scores from Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate exams as an alternative to the SAT or ACT. With this decision, Yale University has become the second Ivy League university after Dartmouth to ditch test-optional policies that were widely accepted during the pandemic.

"Yale will again require students to include scores with their applications. But, for the first time, Yale will allow applicants to report Advanced Placement (AP) or International Baccalaureate (IB) exam scores in lieu of the ACT or SAT," the university said in a statement.

Yale said its policy would be “test flexible,” allowing students to submit scores from subject-based Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate tests as alternatives of SAT or ACT scores.

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Admissions officers examined all of the applications they received this year and gave more weight to certain sections of the application than to others. But as the institution noted, this change frequently served the "disadvantage of applicants from lower socio-economic backgrounds". The admissions round now in progress will not impact applicants based on Yale's decision.

Dartmouth College made a similar announcement in February. Hundreds of students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds who had strong SAT scores—in the 1,400 range—had declined to turn them in because they thought their scores were too close to the ideal 1,600, according to Dartmouth, located in Hanover, New Hampshire.

As per NYT, the group FairTest, which has opposed standardised testing claims that over 80% of four-year colleges—or at least 1,825 of the universities in the US that award bachelor degrees will not require SAT or ACT results. The SAT test was taken by 1.7 million students in 2022, a decline from 2.2 million in 2020.