Standardized Tests, Unstandardized Students

In high school I was terrified of the SAT. I felt like it would make or break my goal of attending an elite college.

The Scholastic Aptitude Test — now known as the SAT — grew out of a test designed to measure the aptitude of potential soldiers before they were admitted to the U.S. Army. Harvard later adopted the test as a means of testing the merit of potential scholarship recipients who did not come from elite, private high schools.

In this way, the SAT served to diversify Harvard, evaluating candidates based on intelligence rather than their high school backgrounds, and providing opportunities for students who lacked resources.

Today, these standardized tests seem to have become an entry ticket to gain admission to top colleges like Harvard — a far cry from their original intention.

In an email, Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean Hopi E. Hoekstra announced that Harvard College is reinstating its testing requirement following four years of test-optional admissions that began during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Her email seemed to reaffirm the original purpose of the test, stating that standardized test scores would provide the committee with more information about candidates, allowing them to evaluate students more equitably.

While a standardized test certainly seems appropriate for this purpose, tests like the SAT and ACT are not truly equitable.

Doing well on these exams has become a business, with companies like The Princeton Review providing costly preparation material for students who can afford it. An SAT prep book or course, for example, can go from around $20 to more than $5,000.

While the ACT and SAT assess skills like reading, writing, and mathematics, they also test a student’s ability to adapt to the test structure. Standardized tests are not testing an individual’s knowledge, but rather their ability to master specific test-taking strategies, like moving quickly through passages and eliminating “distractors” — incorrect answers deliberately designed to mislead students.

This means a comfort with the test structure is incredibly important to doing well, and access to practice resources is essential. While libraries and free online education resources like Khan Academy have made preparation materials more accessible, students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds continue to be less likely to take the test, and tend to have lower scores when compared to richer students.

While I do not doubt the research which has found the SAT to be a great predictor of college success, other factors, including high school grades, can be strong indicators of academic achievement too.

These factors may be overlooked in applications if standardized tests become a barrier to entry in the first place. Students who demonstrate academic potential in alternative ways may lose faith in their merit and be discouraged from applying to schools like Harvard if they lack the support, funding, and opportunity to take and succeed on standardized tests.

Harvard has successfully admitted several diverse, intelligent classes of students under its test-optional policy. If an individual decides not to report a standardized test, it does not necessarily mean they are withholding information that is critical to their evaluation, but rather reflects their belief that standardized tests do not represent their capabilities.

While it is reasonable for Harvard to seek an objective metric to compare its applicants, it is clear that standardized tests are an inequitable way to do so.

Although Harvard’s holistic admissions process claims to consider student background, school performance, and available opportunities, the process is still ambiguous. All we can conclude from the return to testing is that test scores really matter — even as they reduce people to numbers — and that is really not a good thing.

Sandhya Kumar ’26, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a joint concentrator in Molecular & Cellular Biology and Statistics in Winthrop House.