The University of Wisconsin Board of Regents just voted to kill the ACT and SAT requirement for good. What started as a 2020 pandemic workaround is now official policy. Years later after COVID is over the experiment is not.
Regents talk about “empowering students” and “unique educational journeys.” That is consultant language for we would rather not look at a score. They lean on a UW-Madison lab that says first-year GPAs have held steady and that high school coursework beats a test. Fine. Nobody said the SAT should be the only number in the file. The question is whether you throw out the one common yardstick that lets a kid from Tomah be compared to a kid from Whitefish Bay without the admissions office guessing which transcript is inflated.
Dartmouth studied its own test-optional years and published the results. High-achieving students from disadvantaged backgrounds were the ones most likely to hide scores that would have helped them. For those kids, submitting a strong SAT raised the chance of admission from 2.9 percent to 10.2 percent. The same research found test-optional admissions did not grow the demographic diversity of the applicant pool. MIT, Harvard, Yale, Brown, and the rest of the Ivy League looked at similar evidence and brought the tests back. Columbia was the last holdout, but even they folded.
UW is walking the opposite direction.
This is the soft bigotry of woke expectations in institutional form. The assumption is that an objective measure is a trap for the students they claim to champion, so the adults will redesign the game until nobody has to prove anything in public. They imagine they can architect a system that benefits everyone and hurts no one. That is asinine. Grades are not comparable across schools. Course titles are not comparable across schools. A 1400 from a building where the average score is 1000 is information. Hide that accomplishment and you hide the kid who actually beat the odds.
Republicans already tried to force the issue at Madison, but he Regents have ignored them and kept marching toward insanity anyway. The result will not be more fairness, but more guesswork, more tutoring on the back end, and more students admitted on vibes. Standards do not become kinder when you delete the score. This effort to destroy all standards and meritocracy will not result in better outcomes, but a flattening of excellence.
Wisconsin does not need a university system that congratulates itself for outsmarting a test that still works. It needs one that tells talented kids that their work will be measured. Establish a coherent standard and stop pretending you can abolish it and call that compassion.
