The College does many things well. Its stellar faculty and top-of-the-line, all-grant financial aid system are the envy of undergraduate institutions everywhere. But it is falling behind its peers in one important respect: It has not committed to ending its test-optional admissions policy, an outdated and counterproductive holdover from the COVID-19 pandemic. Soon, the College will decide whether the test-optional pilot program that has run for the last five admissions cycles ought to continue. It shouldn’t. 

When a prospective student applies to the College, they are required to submit their high school GPA, three letters of recommendation, and the Common Application personal statement. Whether they submit SAT and ACT scores, however, is left up to them. This wasn’t always the case. According to a 2021 statement from Dean of Admission and Student Financial Services Liz Creighton ’01, the College initially scrapped the test requirement for the 2020-2021 admissions cycle because of practical barriers that made it difficult for applicants to access standardized testing during the pandemic. That policy was extended for an additional two years in order to evaluate its potential to “creat[e] a more equitable [admissions] process beyond the pandemic.” 

Now, after a second two-year extension of the pilot program, the College is deciding whether it should reinstate the testing requirement — taking the path of peer institutions such as Yale, Harvard, Dartmouth, Cornell, Brown, Caltech, and MIT — or continue with its test-optional admissions policy, as some other schools have. If the College elects to continue test-optional admissions, its decision would fly in the face of the substantial body of recent research indicating that test-optional policies tend to disadvantage the very applicants they aim to help apply.

At the College, eliminating parts of the application has likely helped boost application numbers. Last year, more than 15,000 applicants vied for around 550 seats in the incoming class, leading to a record-low admission rate. But by making it easier for students to apply, the College has also reduced the amount of information admissions officers have about each applicant. Some application components might be worth leaving behind since the amount of useful information they provide is relatively low: The recently-ditched supplemental essay probably fell into this bucket, as applicants’ writing skills are (supposedly) already on display in their Common App. personal statements. However, extending the same logic to standardized testing is deeply misguided. Standardized tests provide something unavailable in any other part of the application: a robust quantitative metric that is highly correlated with success in college. According to The New York Times, even after controlling for race and household income, standardized test scores are a strong and equitable indicator of college preparedness — not mere proxies for a student’s background. 

Test scores’ predictive value makes them especially critical for admissions officers looking to identify and admit smart students from disadvantaged backgrounds — a priority all the more pressing for the College since the Supreme Court’s recent decision to ban race-based affirmative action. Unfortunately, under the current test-optional policy, too few prospective students deciding whether to submit their test scores realize that admissions officers evaluate their scores within the context of their individual circumstances: Many schools use the College Board’s “Landscape” tool, which contextualizes applicants’ SAT scores by showing their percentiles relative to other students from the same high schools and neighborhoods. As a result, applicants might wrongly reason that submitting scores lower than the high scores typical of successful applicants would disadvantage them. Admissions officers, not knowing that these students have scores that are strong when viewed in context, might then decide not to admit them.

This problem is exacerbated by the fact that standardized tests are, by a wide margin, the least “gameable” or “buyable” components of the Williams application. Applicants who decide not to submit their strong-in-context test scores are probably also less likely to have received as much support on other parts of the application as their better-resourced peers. While studying for the SAT certainly improves students’ results, doing so does not necessitate a large up-front investment; highly effective prep courses are available for free online. Other elements of the application portfolio are far less accessible, even though they are mandatory: For instance, the significant admissions boost conferred by participation in athletics and other extracurriculars is much more expensive than SAT preparation. Tutors who workshop application essays are similarly costly. 

I don’t oppose retaining those other, non-testing application components: They provide important information about prospective students. However, keeping those elements and requiring test scores — that is, returning the College to the way it operated for most of its modern history — would help admissions officers welcome deserving students whom they might otherwise overlook, ones with high academic potential but few of the other flashy accoutrements of privilege. 

Schuyler Colfax ’25 is a political economy and philosophy major from Austin, Texas.