Dartmouth College

Dartmouth College to Reinstate Standardized Testing Requirement

Dartmouth College will require standardized college admissions tests again, a reversal for the Ivy League institution, which had joined thousands of other schools in making these tests optional amidst the Covid-19 pandemic.

In an announcement, the college—which is the first Ivy League school to reinstate the standardized testing requirement—says it made the decision based on evidence that testing will improve the school’s ability to bring the most promising and diverse students to campus.

“We were really deliberate in the way we made this announcement yesterday to emphasize that we looked at this through the prism of Dartmouth College alone,” Lee Coffin, Dartmouth’s dean of admissions and financial aid, tells Inside Higher Ed. “The faculty looked at our data and gave me a recommendation about our admission process. We did not see this decision at Dartmouth as a more universal truth that everybody must follow. I think there’s lots of schools—many of my peers since I was at Tufts and Connecticut College before that—have been test optional for decades, and they do it well and it’s integral to the way they may read and evaluate their class. And there are others that have maintained testing or, like MIT, reactivated it because they saw a local rationale to do it. I would put Dartmouth in that latter category.”

In its announcement of the reversal, Dartmouth cited a new research study that found that high school grades paired with standardized testing are the most reliable indicators for success in Dartmouth’s course of study. Additionally, according to the study commissioned by Dartmouth, test scores represent an especially valuable tool to identify high-achieving applicants from low and middle-income backgrounds; who are first-generation college-bound – as well as students from urban and rural backgrounds.

TEST-OPTIONAL POLICY NEVER MEANT TO BE PERMANENT

Like many schools across the nation, Dartmouth College went test-optional during the COVID-19 pandemic. But, Coffin says, that decision was a temporary one.

“We made the decision to be test optional in a spontaneous moment as the pandemic really took hold and we were witnessing in real time the shift of all sorts of norms related to our work, whether it was travel or personal things on campus, and certainly elements of the application,” Coffin tells Inside Higher Ed. “If you go all the way back to June 2020, when we announced we would pause the policy, I used the word ‘pause’ intentionally then, because it was my sense that this was a temporary decision and that we would return to our required policy as the pandemic allowed. Who knew that was going to end up being a three-year cycle of extensions?”

Last March, Columbia University became the first Ivy League school to implement a permanent test-optional policy. Harvard University, meanwhile, has adopted a test-optional policy for the class of 2030.

Sources: Forbes, Inside Higher Ed, Dartmouth College

Next Page: Survey Shows Most College Admissions Officers Don’t Check Candidates’ Social Media