Penn will remain SAT optional for the next admission cycle

The University of Pennsylvania will remain test optional for the 2024-25 admissions cycle, it announced on its admissions blog Tuesday afternoon.

That means students for the fourth consecutive year will not be required to supply standardized test scores for admission to the fall 2025 class.

“Students who are unable or choose not to submit test scores will not be at a disadvantage in the admissions process,” Penn said on its blog. Students who want to submit scores will continue to be able to do so, Penn said.

While many colleges, including Penn, suspended their SAT and ACT requirements amid concerns about the impact of the pandemic, Dartmouth and Yale — both Ivy League institutions like Penn — announced last month they would begin requiring students to submit standardized test scores again. (Yale, though, said it would provide students an option of which scores.)

» READ MORE: With Dartmouth requiring SATs again and Yale considering it, what will Penn do?

Penn did not give a rationale for a decision on its website, and its admissions office said it did not have further comment.

In a fall 2022 interview with The Inquirer, Whitney Soule, Penn’s dean of admissions, said of the SAT/ACT requirement:

“In admissions, our responsibility is to effectively evaluate and select students for Penn who will benefit from and contribute to our community and the academic opportunity we provide. To do that, we need to understand the usefulness of the materials that we require and how they contribute to our assessment. Because the move to test-optional was not something we had an opportunity to prepare for, we are taking the time now to evaluate if our processes are still effective when testing is absent.”

» READ MORE: Penn is the latest university to drop the SAT requirement for admission amid coronavirus

Penn, one of the most selective colleges in the country, announced in June 2020 that it would drop the requirement, joining a growing number of other schools making the same decision as the pandemic gripped the world. Small selective colleges such as Haverford, Tufts, and Williams, and larger state universities, such as Rutgers’ New Brunswick and Newark campuses and West Chester University, had already made the same decision.

Penn’s decision at that time followed an announcement by the College Board that an at-home SAT test would not be offered as planned, and as in-person tests had been canceled because of concerns about the spread of the virus.

Some critics have argued for years that the SAT disadvantages students from lower-income backgrounds and that it is a better measure of family affluence than college readiness.

» READ MORE: Meet Whitney Soule, leader of the team who decides whether you get into Penn

But Dartmouth said in announcing the requirement’s return that it found the tests actually help to identify high-achieving applicants from low- and middle-income backgrounds, those would-be first-generation college students, as well as those from urban and rural backgrounds.

Dartmouth said a study commissioned by president Sian Beilock and carried out by faculty found that “high school grades paired with standardized testing are the most reliable indicators for success in Dartmouth’s course of study,” according to an announcement on the school’s website.

Yale cited a similar rationale.

“While evaluating all these applications, our researchers and readers found that when admissions officers reviewed applications with no scores, they placed greater weight on other parts of the application,” the school said. “But this shift frequently worked to the disadvantage of applicants from lower socio-economic backgrounds.”

But Yale also announced a new “test flexible” option. For the first time, the university said, it will allow applicants to provide Advanced Placement (AP) or International Baccalaureate (IB) exam scores instead of the ACT or SAT.