George Washington University in Washington, D.C. has recently announced that it will no longer require applicants to take the SAT or ACT as entrance exams. The university has concluded that reliance on these tests was excluding some high-achieving students who simply don’t test well, and low-income, minority students who don’t bother to apply because their scores are too low.
GWU will still require pre-med and home-schooled students, as well as athletes, to submit test scores, but, like many of the more than 800 other four-year colleges and universities that were already test-optional, it hopes its admissions criteria will now capture a more diverse pool of students.
Some research has found that it isn’t clear whether performance on those tests is a reliable predictor of future academic success, and that a student’s high school academic record (their GPS and the rigor of the courses taken), is a far better predictor of college success than the SAT or ACT.
Critics of the SAT and ACT have long argued that these tests are nothing more than filters that help institutions deal with large numbers of applicants. ( A heavily edited version of an article from NPR, July 2025).
Sounds sensible to me. I think more credence should be given to personal assessments by the high school as as to the academic capabilities of the student and the student’s own “selling” document (hand- written), explaining why he wants to go to university, what he feels he can get out of it and what he has achieved so far in his life.
In mid life and after twenty years running a company I applied to go to the the London Business School for a year. For this I had to pass the GMAT, an American invention entirely foreign to me. No Brit my age was used to multiple choice exams. My training was to analyse the question and to give “on the one hand this” and “on the other hand that” series of answers. Black and white was a total puzzle. In consequence I utterly failed, since I concluded that the questions were either awkwardly phrased or meaningless. However, the Business School chose to ignore the result and accepted me on the principle that maybe ( ?) I knew more than some of the staff! Quite right. Multiple choice! Dear, oh dear!