What started as a temporary COVID-era policy has now become permanent across the UW System.
The UW System Board of Regents voted to eliminate its standardized testing requirement permanently, allowing students to continue applying without submitting ACT or SAT scores.
The requirement was first suspended in 2020, when pandemic shutdowns made standardized testing difficult for high school students. But the supposedly temporary policy never went away. Regents repeatedly extended it, most recently voting in April to keep test-optional admissions in place through 2028.
Now, UW officials have voted to end the requirement altogether.
“This proposed change in policy empowers students who pursue the traditional admission pathway to a UW institution to make the best decision for themselves based on their own unique experiences, educational journeys and academic goals,” UW officials wrote in materials prepared for Thursday’s meeting.
UW officials also cite research from UW-Madison’s Student Success Through Applied Research Lab showing first-year GPAs have remained consistent since 2018 and arguing that factors like high school curriculum, course rigor and time management can be more important predictors of academic achievement.
But as Wisconsin considers making its COVID-era experiment permanent, some of the nation’s most prestigious universities are heading in the opposite direction.
The Equity Argument Gets Complicated
Dartmouth College reinstated standardized testing requirements after studying what happened under its own test-optional policy. What researchers found challenges the idea that eliminating testing requirements necessarily benefits disadvantaged students.
A National Bureau of Economic Research paper examining Dartmouth’s admissions found high-achieving disadvantaged students were especially likely to withhold scores that would have actually helped their applications.
For disadvantaged high achievers, submitting test scores increased their estimated probability of admission from 2.9% to 10.2% — a 3.6-fold difference.
The reason is fairly straightforward. A 1400 SAT score might not stand out among applicants from elite college-prep schools. But for a low-income student attending a school where the average SAT score is closer to 1000, that same score tells admissions officers something important about how much that student accomplished with the opportunities available. Without the score, admissions officers lose that piece of information.
Researchers also found that test-optional admissions did not increase the demographic diversity of Dartmouth’s applicant pool and that standardized test scores helped predict academic performance across demographic groups.
Dartmouth ultimately restored its testing requirement.
It isn’t alone. MIT, Brown, Harvard, Yale and other highly selective universities have restored or announced plans to restore standardized testing after suspending requirements during the pandemic.
Wisconsin Republicans Sounded the Alarm
Wisconsin Republicans have already attempted to push the UW System in the opposite direction. Earlier this year, Republican lawmakers introduced legislation that would restore standardized testing requirements for admission to UW-Madison.
Rep. Dave Murphy, a co-author of the proposal, argued standardized tests provide an objective measurement alongside grades and other admissions factors.
“They’ve done that a number of times, so I have no idea that they’re going to end that policy,” Murphy told the Daily Cardinal in February about UW’s repeated extensions of the temporary suspension. “The bill is about making it happen for sure.”
Former Republican state Sen. Duey Stroebel raised similar concerns in 2024, arguing that permanently moving away from standardized testing could weaken academic standards.
Critics of testing requirements counter that SAT and ACT scores can reflect socioeconomic disparities and that wealthier students have greater access to test preparation and repeated attempts. But Dartmouth’s findings complicate that argument. Removing an objective measure doesn’t necessarily help disadvantaged students — and in some cases, it can eliminate evidence showing just how exceptional their academic performance actually is.
There is also a larger question for the UW System: what happens when universities steadily remove objective measurements of college readiness?
Standardized tests aren’t perfect, but they provide a universal measuring stick to compare students from school to school. While the UW would prefer to look at a student’s academic career more holistically, admitting students who aren’t prepared for college-level coursework can create its own problems — greater demand for tutoring and academic support, additional coursework and students spending more time and money pursuing degrees they may never finish.
The testing requirement disappeared because of an unprecedented pandemic. Six years later, COVID is no longer the issue.
But instead of returning to the pre-pandemic standard, the UW Board of Regents has now voted to make the change permanent, ending the ACT and SAT requirement for admission — even as universities across the country are taking another look at the value of the tests they once abandoned.
