The SATs have been around since 1926 and have played an important role in college admissions for almost one hundred years. Up until very recently, most colleges have required applicants to their school to submit their SAT scores in order to help them decide whether to accept or reject them. Since the pandemic, though, applicants have been able to decide for themselves whether or not they submit their SAT scores to colleges; if they think their score will help their application, they include it, but if they think it will hurt their chances of getting accepted into schools, they don’t. While this policy may seem beneficial to students, it will end up leaving the SATs utterly useless. Soon, colleges will have to decide to revert back to requiring SAT scores from all applicants or not considering them at all.

Currently, students are advised to include their SAT scores in their application if their score is above the 50th percentile of SAT scores from students who were admitted to the school in the prior year’s admissions cycle.  Logically, this makes sense; you’d only want to include your score if you scored higher than the average applicant, but if students strictly adhered to this advice, the 50th percentile of scores for each school would increase each year. Imagine a school’s 50th percentile was 1200 this year; next year, only students with a score above 1200 would want to submit their scores. If students with scores below 1200 applied without submitting their scores, the new 50th percentile would have to be much higher than 1200. Each year, as students only submit scores above the new 50th percentile, the median score would continue to increase. As the 50th percentile gets higher and higher, less and less students would submit their scores. Eventually, very few students would submit scores at all and every college would report having incredibly high average SAT scores. This system doesn’t make sense. 

For now, this potential flaw hasn’t become too big of an issue. While average SAT scores amongst admitted applicants at colleges may have slightly increased since the decision to go test optional was made, only a few admission cycles have occurred since the pandemic. In time, once colleges across the nation are able to analyze the trends in how many students submit SAT scores and what the average score amongst admitted applicants is, it is possible that schools will have to decide whether or not they want to even factor in the standardized test as a part of their decision making anymore. If they do, they may be forced to require all applicants to submit their scores once again. The current system will not be able to function forever.