The University of Pennsylvania announced Friday that it would reinstate its standardized testing requirement for admission after a four-year pause spurred by the pandemic.
“The flexibility of a test-optional policy has escalated decision-making stress in an application process that is already stressful,” the university said on its admissions website. “Requiring submission of SAT or ACT results removes the ‘submission choice’ stress and allows students to focus their energy on preparing the components of the application that are personal and provide breadth and depth for our review.”
The requirement will begin again with the 2025-26 admission cycle, the university said, for students entering in fall 2026. Students who have a hardship in accessing testing can submit a waiver with their application under the school’s updated policy, the university said.
» READ MORE: Penn will remain SAT optional for the next admission cycle
Penn emphasized that testing will be only one part of its larger comprehensive review of applicants, which includes looking at curriculum, grades, writing, and recommendations.
Some other elite universities announced last year they would revive the requirement. Dartmouth and Yale — both Ivy League institutions like Penn — announced a year ago they would begin requiring students to submit standardized test scores again. (Yale, though, said at the time it would provide students an option of which scores to submit.) Stanford, Harvard, and Cornell are among other universities that are making the move back to requiring the test.
Penn, one of the most selective colleges in the country, announced in June 2020 that it would drop the requirement, joining a growing number of other schools at the time as the pandemic gripped the world.
Penn’s decision had followed an announcement by the College Board that an at-home SAT test would not be offered as planned, and as in-person tests had been canceled because of concerns about the spread of the virus.
Some critics have argued for years that the SAT disadvantages students from lower-income backgrounds and that it is a better measure of family affluence than college readiness. Many colleges, though not the most elite institutions, had gone test-optional well before the pandemic.
Dartmouth said in announcing the requirement’s return last year that it found the tests actually help to identify high-achieving applicants from low- and middle-income backgrounds, those would-be first-generation college students, as well as those from urban and rural backgrounds.
Dartmouth said a study commissioned by president Sian Beilock and carried out by faculty found that “high school grades paired with standardized testing are the most reliable indicators for success in Dartmouth’s course of study,” according to an announcement on the school’s website.