Do test scores still matter? The colleges' own numbers say yes

The finding, in plain English

The arithmetic is simple. If 36% of a college's applicants submitted a score but 51% of its admitted students did — USC's own published figures for the Class of 2028 — then submitters must have been admitted at a meaningfully higher rate than non-submitters. Work the arithmetic through and the advantage comes to about 1.9×. That's derivation from the school's own numbers, not modeling. The same calculation runs 3.2× at Cornell Arts & Sciences, 2.0× at Notre Dame, and 1.2× at Vanderbilt (table below).

The colleges have started saying it out loud. 23 well-known colleges — including Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Yale, Caltech, UT-Austin, and Cornell (effective Fall 2026) — have reinstated a testing requirement after studying their own test-optional results. Across the 1,396 four-year colleges in our database that report a test policy (federal IPEDS, 2023), 1,263 remain test-optional, 101 require scores, and 32 — including every UC and CSU campus — do not consider scores at all.

The research explains why. The Opportunity Insights team found that among students with the same high-school grades and background, moving from a 1200 to a 1600 SAT predicts a first-year college GPA about 0.43 points higher — while moving from a 3.2 to a 4.0 high-school GPA predicts a difference of less than 0.1. As grade inflation has flattened the GPA signal, the score has become one of the clearest pieces of information a college has.

Four takeaways for a family deciding whether to test

1. At selective test-optional colleges, a good score still helps. The schools' own numbers show submitters admitted at 1.2 to 3.2 times the rate of non-submitters. "Optional" describes the checkbox, not the outcome.
2. Testing keeps the whole list open. With 101 colleges requiring scores — 23 of them well-known schools that brought the requirement back — a student who never tests has quietly crossed schools off the list before applying. A student who tests can still choose, college by college, whether to submit.
3. When in doubt, submit — even slightly below the range. Dartmouth's faculty study found that less-resourced students were withholding scores around 1400 that would actually have helped their applications — because selective colleges read a score against the student's own high school, not only against their published range. Dartmouth put it plainly: "A score that falls below our class mean but several hundred points above the mean at the student's school is 'high' and, as such, it has value as one factor among many in our holistic assessment." A number under a college's 25th percentile can still be the signal that helps. The practical rule: compare the score to each college's middle-50% band and submit when it's in the range, above it, or a little below. Our searchable score-range table covers 985 colleges' bands.
4. Scores now carry more signal than grades. Opportunity Insights: a 1200-to-1600 SAT difference predicts about 0.43 points of first-year college GPA; a 3.2-to-4.0 high-school GPA difference predicts less than 0.1. UT-Austin found score submitters earned a first-semester GPA 0.86 points higher — a key reason it reinstated its requirement. To see what a given score does to admit odds at a specific college, our free score-odds calculator runs the numbers.

Method & sources: Submission shares are each school's own published figures: Cornell Office of Institutional Research & Planning (Test Score Task Force, Fall 2023); USC Undergraduate Admission and Common Data Set 2024-25 (Class of 2028); University of Notre Dame Admissions (Class of 2026 Restrictive Early Action); Vanderbilt Office of Undergraduate Admissions (Class of 2025). The submitter-advantage multiple is the odds ratio implied by the applicant and admit submission shares — it requires no assumptions beyond the school's own two numbers. Test-policy counts: federal IPEDS Admissions (2023), with publicly confirmed corrections for test-blind systems (the UC and CSU campuses) and reinstated requirements. Predictive-validity findings: Opportunity Insights (Friedman, Sacerdote & Tine, 2024), Dartmouth faculty study (2024), UT-Austin announcement (2024) — all linked with full context on our test-scores page. See the full methodology.