Standardized college entrance exams were once a prominent feature in the college admissions process. But they haven’t recovered from two COVID-era challenges.

The first was logistical: For the fall 2020 and fall 2021 admission cycles, most colleges and universities dropped testing requirements because it was difficult for students to take the tests, especially in blue states that were more restrictive of gatherings.

The second was ideological: The left-wing notion that the exams themselves were racially biased against minorities or that, at minimum, the scores were merely a reflection of the applicant’s socioeconomic status — a proxy for household wealth.

The trouble with these arguments is that it’s hard to untangle correlation from causation. First, the idea that divergent outcomes among racial groups must be attributable to discrimination makes little sense in practice. Are the NBA and NFL anti-white? As scholar John McWhorter aptly put it, the idea that blackness is culturally incompatible with standardized tests is highly questionable.

Second, wealthier households are more commonly two-parent homes with educated, involved parents. Such families confer numerous advantages to their children, including discipline, structure, and an emphasis on academic achievement. Not surprisingly, their children (regardless of race) tend to have stronger grade-point averages, greater levels of extracurricular involvement, and higher standardized test scores.

The problem is if you stop requiring students to complete standardized tests, it’s not as if selective colleges can just admit a higher percentage of applicants. If you only have 500 open slots and 5,000 students apply, you just have to use other criteria to decide which 10% of the applicants get in. Removing test scores from the equation means placing more emphasis on grades and extracurricular activities.

Return to Testing

In the spring of 2024, the University of Texas (UT) at Austin joined MIT, Dartmouth, Yale, Brown, and others in once again requiring standardized testing as part of its first-year application process. In their announcements, they gave two similar reasons for doing so: One, standardized test scores predict first-year college grades, regardless of a student’s background or family income. Two, test scores allow greater differentiation of applicants, given the reality of high school grade inflation. As UT wrote in its announcement, “With an abundance of high school GPAs surrounding 4.0 … an SAT or ACT score is a proven differentiator that is in each student’s and the University’s best interest.”

But not everyone followed their lead. California’s public universities, for example, are (for now) not only test optional, but test blind. Test optional means students can choose to submit their test scores or not. Test blind means a college or university absolutely won’t consider your test scores, even if you submit them.

As the standardized tests have been making a comeback, their format has been changing. In addition to digitization — which makes sense — the goal was to create a “less stressful” experience for students. Remember, the SAT and ACT are also big-money operations. In the fall of 2019, some 2.2 million students took the SAT. But last fall, just under two million took it. That’s an almost 10% loss in test revenue over the span of five years.

In the name of less stress, the tests are now a lot shorter: just over two hours as opposed to three hours. Fewer questions. More time per question. Significantly, the previous version of the SAT featured reading passages that ranged from 500 to 750 words with multiple questions following each passage. But the new version has reading passages ranging from only 25 to 150 words, with just one question tied to each passage.

The ACT has made similar changes: 44 fewer questions overall, a shorter test (125 minutes versus the previous 195 minutes), and more time per question. The ACT’s reading section is now 40 minutes long (previously 35 minutes) and has 36 questions (previously 40). It’s one fewer question per passage (four reading passages with nine questions per passage instead of 10).

Both the SAT and the ACT made their math sections easier: The number of answer choices is now four instead of five, meaning your chance of randomly guessing the right answer increases from 20% to 25%.

As an educator, I’m concerned that in making the SAT and ACT less stressful, we’ve also made them easier. We’ve lowered academic expectations to account for the fact that teens today have shorter attention spans and more difficulty extracting meaning from 500- to 750-word passages. But if we make the tests easier, they won’t be as useful. They won’t be as predictive of students’ ability to successfully perform college-level academic work.

This article isn’t a commercial for it, but there is an alternate standardized test that hasn’t reduced its reading content.

The Classical Learning Test (CLT)

The ACT and SAT tend to feature reading passages from the modern age and sometimes from a more progressive ideological lens. But the source material of the CLT goes back to Plato, Aristotle, and the most influential thinkers throughout history—those who have driven the development of thought and culture down to the present day. The CLT consists of three required sections: Verbal Reasoning, Grammar/Writing, and Quantitative Reasoning. It’s a relatively new test, but one that by 2023 was accepted by over 200 colleges. Today, that list has grown to over 300 colleges.

Growth in CLT usage mirrors the growing popularity of classical education. Classical education is hard to define, but it’s centered on robust liberal arts training — the impartation of the knowledge and skills needed to be a free (liberated) and virtuous citizen. That includes grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music, and science. It places an emphasis on reading works of enduring value, and reading them in their entirety. It values virtue, character formation, and life preparation as much as academic skill.

Between 2019 and 2023, 264 new classical schools were started. This represented an average 4.8% growth rate of new schools per year. In addition, hundreds of thousands of home-educated students today use classical education curricula.

However you educate your children, and whatever standardized test(s) you have them take, never lower academic standards as you train them. There is no good reason why they cannot do what kids between the ages of 14 and 17 in past generations have done. Coddling teens won’t protect them but rather weaken them. In an age when fewer students are capable of deep reading and comprehension, such skills will only grow in value.

Alex Chediak (Ph.D., U.C. Berkeley) is a professor and the author of Thriving at College (Tyndale House, 2011), a roadmap for how students can best navigate the challenges of their college years. His latest book is Beating the College Debt Trap. Learn more about him at www.alexchediak.com or follow him on Twitter (@chediak).