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Why SAT Scores Are More Important Than Ever

By ABLE Enrichment · Oct 02, 2026

Here's something most parents haven't caught up with yet: the test-optional era is quietly ending. And it's not ending at random schools. It's ending at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, MIT — the schools your kid is actually aiming for.

For a few years there, it felt like the SAT didn't matter anymore. COVID hit, colleges went test-optional, and a lot of families figured test prep was a thing of the past. That was a reasonable read at the time. It's just not true anymore.

So who brought the test back?

MIT went first, back in March 2022. Their admissions dean basically said: we tried reading applications without scores, and we couldn't reliably tell who would succeed at MIT. That got people's attention.

Then February 2024 hit and the dominoes fell fast. Dartmouth — the first Ivy to reverse course. Then Yale. Brown. UT Austin. Caltech. Harvard in April, which was a big deal because Harvard had publicly promised to stay test-optional through the Class of 2030 and broke that promise two years early. Cornell, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, UPenn. The entire public university systems of Florida, Georgia, and Tennessee require scores now. Purdue, Ohio State, Auburn — the list keeps growing.

This isn't a couple of holdouts. It's a wave.

The part nobody expected

Here's the twist: the schools didn't bring back testing because they're old-fashioned. They brought it back because their own research told them test-optional was hurting the exact students it was supposed to help.

Dartmouth ran the numbers and found something uncomfortable. Low-income and first-generation applicants were looking at Dartmouth's published score medians, deciding their own scores weren't good enough, and withholding them. But those scores — judged against the applicant's own high school, not against the national median — would actually have strengthened their applications. Admissions never saw the evidence. Good kids were screening themselves out.

Yale found a related problem. Take away the test score and admissions readers lean harder on everything else — the essays, the extracurriculars, the recommendation letters. Which happens to be the part of the application that money buys. A polished essay with a $500-an-hour consultant behind it. A summer "passion project" in Costa Rica. As one Harvard economist put it: "Not everyone can hire an expensive college coach to help them craft a personal essay. But everyone has the chance to ace the SAT or the ACT."

MIT's dean said the quiet part out loud: "We believe a requirement is more equitable and transparent than a test-optional policy." Read that again. The requirement is the equitable part.

The research is pretty blunt

A 2025 study from researchers at Harvard, Dartmouth, and Brown — published through the National Bureau of Economic Research, not some test-prep company's marketing department — found that SAT/ACT scores predict first-year college grades with four times the strength of high school GPA. Four times. Kids in the 99th percentile earned college GPAs nearly half a point higher than kids in the 75th. High school GPA, meanwhile, had "little predictive power."

And it's not just about freshman year. Economists Raj Chetty, David Deming, and John Friedman tracked half a million applicants through federal tax records and found test scores "highly predictive of post-college success." Harvard cited that study by name when it reinstated testing.

Why would grades predict so little? Because of what's happened to grades. ACT data shows the average high school GPA climbed from 3.17 to 3.36 between 2010 and 2021 — while actual test performance fell. By 2022, almost 90% of students were pulling A's or B's in core subjects. When everybody's transcript looks the same, the transcript stops telling colleges anything. The New York Times summed it up: "Test scores are more reliable than high school grades, partly because of grade inflation."

And then there's the math of competition

The Common App just logged a record 10.8 million applications in a single cycle. The average student now applies to seven schools. Most of that volume is piling up at the same selective colleges, which means acceptance rates keep grinding lower and the pile of similar-looking applications keeps growing.

In that environment, a strong SAT score does something nothing else in the file does: it gives an admissions officer an objective reason to pull your kid's application out of the stack. Even at schools that are still technically test-optional, a Kaplan survey found two-thirds of admissions offices say a competitive submitted score helps.

What this means for your kid

Strip away the policy debate and the message from colleges is remarkably consistent: a great SAT score is one of the few things in this process your child fully controls. You can't control grade inflation at their school. You can't control how many applications Harvard gets. You can control how prepared your kid is on test day.

If selective colleges — or serious merit scholarships, where scores still carry enormous weight — are anywhere in your family's plans, SAT prep isn't optional anymore. It's the highest-return move in the application.

Want to talk about where your child stands? Explore ABLE's SAT prep program or call (518) 738-9750 — we'll give you an honest assessment, free.

Sources

• Friedman, Sacerdote, Staiger & Tine, "Standardized Test Scores and Academic Performance at Ivy-Plus Colleges," NBER Working Paper No. w33570 (March 2025)
• Chetty, Deming & Friedman, "Diversifying Society's Leaders?" Opportunity Insights (July 2023)
• David Leonhardt, "The Misguided War on the SAT," The New York Times (Jan 7, 2024)
• Stanford News (June 7, 2024); Harvard Magazine (April 2024)
• MIT Dean of Admissions Stuart Schmill (March 2022); Dartmouth President Sian Leah Beilock (Feb 2024); Yale Admissions (Feb 2024)
• ACT, "The Implications of Grade Inflation" (2025); Inside Higher Ed (May 2022)
• Common App final 2025–26 data; Kaplan 2023 admissions survey (Business Wire, Feb 2024)