UT Austin will not require SAT or ACT scores for admissions consideration for Fall 2022 applicants. Texas A&M won’t require them from freshmen for Spring, Summer and Fall of ’21. In California, with 280,000 students, admissions tests will be phased out entirely within five years.
It’s all part of the Covid disruptions. High school seniors in 2020 found themselves cancelling, rescheduling, and cancelling college admissions tests again and again as the drama of the pandemic unfolded, and colleges across the country have had to rethink what qualities matter most in prospective student candidates. Having learned to adjust, they may not go back to the way things were. “And that’s one of the reasons that I love being at a community college,” says Dr. Lee Ann Nutt, President of Lone Star College - Tomball. “We really look at the students’ capacity based on those other characteristics and not just on an admissions test score.” Community colleges have open admissions policies, a practice universities may learn from.
Getting in to college hasn’t changed much in the past 50 years as standardized testing has become universally standardized, but Covid changed all that in under a year. The National Association for College Admission Counseling recently put out a report that reads: “After we emerge from the Covid 19 pandemic and related restrictions, we cannot simply “go back to normal.’” Dr. Nutt is finding the same applies to community colleges. “I think another impact of the pandemic is that it encourages parents and students to consider other options that they may not have otherwise,” she says.
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