Skip to content
ADVERTISEMENT
Sign In
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Virtual Events
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
  • More
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Virtual Events
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
    Upcoming Events:
    An AI-Driven Work Force
    AI and Microcredentials
Sign In
no-testing-full-bleed.jpg
Illustration by The Chronicle

Test-Free in Texas: Inside One College’s Decision to Cut Out the ACT and SAT

For this institution, ditching the standardized tests was a complicated decision.

The New Enrollment
By Eric Hoover May 19, 2021

Like most people in the enrollment field, Rosalind V. Alderman has lived with ACT and SAT scores for decades. The numbers have long been woven into the enrollment projections, financial-aid policies, and student-success strategies she’s in charge of. So it felt strange when she first imagined what life would be like without all of that testing data. Strange, she says, but also liberating.

To continue reading for FREE, please sign in.

Sign In

Or subscribe now to read with unlimited access for as low as $10/month.

Don’t have an account? Sign up now.

A free account provides you access to a limited number of free articles each month, plus newsletters, job postings, salary data, and exclusive store discounts.

Sign Up

Like most people in the enrollment field, Rosalind V. Alderman has lived with ACT and SAT scores for decades. The numbers have long been woven into the enrollment projections, financial-aid policies, and student-success strategies she’s in charge of. So it felt strange when she first imagined what life would be like without all of that testing data. Strange, she says, but also liberating.

Alderman, vice provost for enrollment management at St. Mary’s University, in San Antonio, is just one leader at one small institution. But she’s been weighing the same question that many college officials have been considering during this tumultuous admissions cycle: Which standardized-testing policy is best for the long haul?

Since the pandemic began, many institutions have adopted a test-optional policy, allowing applicants to submit scores if they choose. St. Mary’s announced this week that it’s going a step further by becoming test-free, removing the ACT and SAT from all admissions and aid decisions.

Dozens of colleges have made the same move over the last year or so. In February 2020, right before Covid-19 shut down everything, tiny Hampshire College, in Amherst, Mass., was the only test-free institution in the nation. (Northern Illinois University had just announced a plan to follow suit, starting with the 2020-21 admissions cycle.)

But the pandemic shook up the status quo: In the end, 69 institutions had test-free policies for applicants seeking fall-2021 admission, according to the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, known as FairTest. Though it’s too soon to say how many colleges will be test-free for the fall of 2022 and beyond, the once-exotic policy has become much more familiar.

That doesn’t mean it’s an easy path to choose. Whatever your view of test-free admissions, know this: Deciding to strip the ACT and SAT out of the entire process is a major chore requiring thoughtful deliberation, a trove of institutional data, and a long checklist of questions. It’s by no means as simple as flipping a switch from “test-optional” to “test-free,” as officials at St. Mary’s could tell you.

Alderman, who started at the Texas university as an assistant director of residence life in 1993, always saw high test scores as a byproduct of privilege. But she didn’t understand how large a role those scores played in the St. Mary’s admissions and aid process until she joined the enrollment division, in 2008. The university, which had required the ACT or SAT for as long as anyone could remember, used a relatively cut-and-dried formula to determine eligibility for admission and non-need-based scholarships: High-school grades and test scores drove those decisions.

That combination made sense to Alderman despite her concern about the weight of ACT/SAT scores. After all, the St. Mary’s process was efficient. And it was more or less the way admissions was done on many campuses. Especially in Texas, full of universities that relied heavily on test scores.

Moreover, at St. Mary’s — a tuition-dependent, Hispanic-serving institution enrolling many first-generation and low-income students — the annual push to bring in a class and meet revenue goals is intense. How much time and energy was there for innovation? “There’s a lot of pressure for a college like ours,” Alderman says. “We can only tweak so many things.”

ADVERTISEMENT

Still, Alderman often thought about the human implications of testing requirements and financial-aid leveraging strategies that reward applicants who have high scores. On recruiting trips to her native Puerto Rico, she met students with top-notch grades who were interested in social justice and changing the world. These were students for whom, like many applicants in Texas, English was a second language. “They were excellent in everything,” Alderman says, “but they didn’t have the best test scores.”

For that reason alone, Alderman knew, those applicants wouldn’t be eligible for the university’s most-generous scholarships. “There was really no option for them,” Alderman says. “Following our admissions guidelines, I didn’t have any flexibility to go off-script.”

Covid-19 shredded the script. After testing centers shut down, in March 2020, St. Mary’s switched to a test-optional policy, allowing it to evaluate a small percentage of prospective students who still had yet to apply for fall admission.

All of a sudden, St. Mary’s, like many other institutions, had to devise a different way to assess students. One adjustment: requiring test-optional applicants to submit a recommendation letter and complete a résumé using a template the university created.

ADVERTISEMENT

That was fine for a small group of applicants. But as Alderman and her colleagues looked ahead to the 2020-21 cycle, they imagined the challenge of combing through thousands of PDF résumés. They concluded that the résumé was too confining for applicants, who had no place to describe after-school commitments such as taking care of a grandmother several hours a week. And Alderman worried that the information didn’t lend itself to objective assessment.

“It was incomplete and too much at the same time,” Alderman says. “It was indicative of us not trusting test-optional at first.”

After deciding to extend the test-optional policy for fall-2021 applicants due to Covid-19, St. Mary’s officials worked through the growing pains that often accompany shifts in admission requirements. They considered thorny questions, such as whether it would be fair to look at the academic strength of an applicant’s high school. Yes, they decided, but it wouldn’t carry too much weight. Students would have the option of submitting a résumé, essay, and recommendation.

Before application-review season commenced, the admissions staff completed implicit-bias training to prepare for a more-subjective review process. It was eye-opening, says Alderman, who came to a realization that some of her peers at other colleges might be afraid to admit: “Holistic review scared the crap out of me. The question was: How subjective are we going to be? Does it put us in a more precarious place than leaning on test scores?”

ADVERTISEMENT

In its first full year without an ACT/SAT requirement, St. Mary’s doubled down on applicants’ high-school transcripts, looking carefully at their grades, their course selection, and the connection between those courses and their chosen major. For the first time, the admissions staff factored class rank into the scoring of applicants, though it played a small role. Some students were sure-fire admits; others, like the one who had excelled after a rough year as a high-school freshman, required a closer look.

The new process at St. Mary’s meant saying goodbye to “the grid.” It was a chart the university started posting on its website several years ago to allow applicants to see the ranges of grade-point averages and test scores they would need to be admitted. They could also see that if they had X GPA and Y ACT/SAT score, they would get a scholarship worth Z dollars (the university awarded additional need-based grants in a separate process after admission). The straightforward transparency of the grid, Alderman says, proved helpful to applicants worried about the cost of attending the university, which has a $50,000 annual sticker price (the average net price for students receiving aid is less than half that sum, according to federal data).

For fall-2021 applicants, St. Mary’s officials knew that a more holistic review process would not lend itself to a chart or rubric, especially because many students wouldn’t be sending scores. So the scholarship grid came down. “That felt like a risk,” Alderman says. “The grid had worked well for us.”

This time around, St. Mary’s ran a two-lane process. If an applicant submitted scores, the university considered them for admission and scholarships. If an applicant didn’t submit scores, the university considered everything else for both.

ADVERTISEMENT

Before the next admissions cycle began, St. Mary’s would have to decide if a half-in, half-out testing policy made sense.

For many students, getting into college isn’t the end of the story. It’s the prelude to a crucial question: Will they be able to afford it?

St. Mary’s officials had already been thinking about how their scholarship policies might change before the pandemic. Covid just made the discussions more urgent. For months, the question of affordability loomed over recent discussions of testing requirements.

“In some cases over the years, that merit scholarship was making or breaking a student’s ability to come here,” Alderman says. “For us, this really turned into a conversation about trying to more equitably award our scholarships. The higher the test score, the more merit aid a student gets, the more it’s likely we’re giving aid to a student who doesn’t need it.”

ADVERTISEMENT

During a meeting several months ago, Tony Sarda, director of undergraduate admission, asked his colleagues a question: “Is there room for us to consider going test-free?”

No one objected. The question, though, was how the university would know if test-free were the right path. Alderman told Sarda the answer would depend on sound data. So he helped gather it.

Sarda knows his way around numbers. In his previous job, at Lamar University, in Beaumont, Tex., he scoured internal data and found that students’ high-school grades and class rank reliably predicted their first- and second-year retention rates, but that the SAT didn’t add any predictive value. Two students with the same GPA and a 100-point difference in scores were just as likely to persist. Those findings helped persuade Lamar to drop its testing requirements last year for good.

At St. Mary’s, Sarda helped lead a deep dive into institutional data, which revealed this: For 80 to 85 percent of first-time students at St. Mary’s, test scores provided no additional predictive value in first- to second-year retention beyond what an applicant’s high-school transcript revealed. For a small group of students — applicants with lower GPAs and higher test scores — the scores were helpful on that count, Sarda says.

ADVERTISEMENT

But was that enough to justify a test requirement? No, Sarda thought.

“I was OK losing the marginal added value of what testing gave me for a small population of students, and making life easier for all students,” Sarda says. “I had to ask myself, Why are we adding to the stress students experience in the admissions process by putting on a pedestal this idea that you are defined by this one score you make on one Saturday of your life?”

To help St. Mary’s assess the desirability of a test-free policy, Sarda had enlisted the help of Enrollment Research Associates. He also hired Akil Bello, senior director of advocacy and advancement at FairTest, as a consultant.

In weekly Zoom meetings, Bello posed many questions to Sarda. One concerned the university’s mission and level of selectivity. St. Mary’s admitted 79 percent of its applicants for the fall of 2019, and 84 percent for the fall of 2020. Why had a college-access engine ever required test scores in the first place?

ADVERTISEMENT

“Especially at institutions with higher admit rates, you have to ask if the test is really an academic indicator or just a random hoop to jump through,” Bello says. “We spend a lot of time debating as a society whether we should get rid of tests instead of reversing the conversation and asking how the test is performing. It can’t be, ‘We’ve been using it for a while, therefore it must be good.’”

Bello encouraged Sarda to consider a permanent test-optional policy instead of test-free one. That way, applicants who are proud of their ACT or SAT scores could still submit them. After all, those scores might help them. Why take that choice away?

But Sarda heard a different view from Tara Miller, a longtime college counselor in Austin, Tex., whom he had invited to participate in the weekly meetings. He wanted to hear her in-the-trenches perspective on how testing policies affect students.

Calling something optional doesn’t actually make it so, Miller told him. “This process is so driven by colleges, and students have been taught to fall in line,” she says. “You give students a choice, and they feel like they still have to jump through the hoop. If you remove the hoop, it’s not ambiguous anymore.”

ADVERTISEMENT

Over the last year, St. Mary’s contacted several prospective students whose applications were complete except for an ACT or SAT score, but who had not selected the test-optional path. When admissions officers explained that the students were free to choose whether to submit scores or not, some seemed skeptical: “Is this a trick?”

Applicants might think of their ACT or SAT score as a measure of academic achievement and potential. But the conversations about test-optional and test-free policies unfolding all over the nation right now are really about much more than students’ skills, as measured on an exam. If you believe all the hand-wringing about which policy is best boils down to an earnest debate over measuring college readiness or merit, guess again.

Simply put, test scores are tied up in the systems colleges use to protect their bottom line and keep their business wheels turning. The numbers underpin the statistical models institutions use to predict yield — the percentage of accepted students who enroll — as well as net revenue. And to leverage aid.

Under a test-optional policy, St. Mary’s had to adjust its scholarship-eligibility thresholds to (a) preserve an equitable means of distributing aid to students and (b) ensure that the university didn’t exceed its aid budget. In turn, the institution had to adjust the predictive models it uses to enroll a first-year class.

ADVERTISEMENT

“What we didn’t know was if we could still hit the discount rate we have to hit when we apply a whole new way of looking at students,” Alderman says. “That was the gamble.”

So far, so good, Alderman says. As of mid-May, the university’s discount rate was holding steady compared with last year’s. St. Mary’s expects to enroll a class of 580, up from 514 last fall. Though applications were down slightly from 2020, they were on pace with 2019, when it received just under 5,000. The university’s yield rate was 15 percent, up from 10 percent at the same point last spring.

To date, 75 percent of accepted students were evaluated under a test-optional policy. The high-school GPA for the incoming class is the same as the previous year’s. About 40 percent are eligible for Pell Grants. Those results assured Alderman and Sarda that St. Mary’s can make sound decisions without test scores.

In the end, St. Mary’s officials decided to make a clean break from the ACT and SAT. They didn’t want students to second-guess whether a test-optional policy was really optional.

ADVERTISEMENT

This spring, the university’s leadership approved a test-free policy, starting for applicants for fall-2022 admission. With that, St. Mary’s became the first institution in Texas to cut the ACT and SAT out of its process.

Alderman, who oversaw the university’s retention efforts in her previous position, was struck by the finding that, for most students, ACT and SAT scores didn’t help St. Mary’s predict persistence. She came to see the test-centric status quo as more precarious than trying something new. Though she suspects some prospective students steeped in the culture of testing might write off St. Mary’s because it’s now test-free, she hopes it appeals to students, particularly disadvantaged ones, who otherwise might not apply.

Still, there’s uncertainty. While Alderman would welcome more applications, she says, she can’t guarantee that a test-free policy will improve the university’s market position. “Can I tell you that this decision will translate to more students? I can’t.” There are also still many details to hammer out, such as the best way to determine course placement for students who don’t submit scores.

Recently, admissions officials at other colleges have asked Sarda what should be used in place of the ACT and SAT. It’s a logical question, especially if one thinks in terms of a recipe: Typically, when you take one major ingredient out, you need to swap something else in.

ADVERTISEMENT

But that’s the wrong way to look at it, Sarda says. “Needing to replace the test with something else means that it told us something critical to begin with,” he says. “We just don’t find that to be the case.”

Examining test requirements has made Sarda question the entire admissions process. What other means of defining a qualified applicant are ripe for reconsideration? “We need to be making space as admissions professionals to ask questions of ourselves,” he says, “even when the answers might make us uncomfortable.”

On any campus, a testing policy is just one piece of the big enrollment puzzle. Colleges now scrutinizing their testing policies must decide whether the option they choose will mark the end of the discussion or the beginning of a broader one about how the admissions and aid process should evolve.

We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
Tags
Admissions & Enrollment Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion Innovation & Transformation Leadership & Governance
Share
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Facebook
  • Email
Eric Hoover
About the Author
Eric Hoover
Eric Hoover writes about the challenges of getting to, and through, college. Follow him on Twitter @erichoov, or email him, at eric.hoover@chronicle.com.
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT

More News

Photo illustration showing Santa Ono seated, places small in the corner of a dark space
'Unrelentingly Sad'
Santa Ono Wanted a Presidency. He Became a Pariah.
Illustration of a rushing crowd carrying HSI letters
Seeking precedent
Funding for Hispanic-Serving Institutions Is Discriminatory and Unconstitutional, Lawsuit Argues
Photo-based illustration of scissors cutting through paper that is a photo of an idyllic liberal arts college campus on one side and money on the other
Finance
Small Colleges Are Banding Together Against a Higher Endowment Tax. This Is Why.
Pano Kanelos, founding president of the U. of Austin.
Q&A
One Year In, What Has ‘the Anti-Harvard’ University Accomplished?

From The Review

Photo- and type-based illustration depicting the acronym AAUP with the second A as the arrow of a compass and facing not north but southeast.
The Review | Essay
The Unraveling of the AAUP
By Matthew W. Finkin
Photo-based illustration of the Capitol building dome propped on a stick attached to a string, like a trap.
The Review | Opinion
Colleges Can’t Trust the Federal Government. What Now?
By Brian Rosenberg
Illustration of an unequal sign in black on a white background
The Review | Essay
What Is Replacing DEI? Racism.
By Richard Amesbury

Upcoming Events

Plain_Acuity_DurableSkills_VF.png
Why Employers Value ‘Durable’ Skills
Warwick_Leadership_Javi.png
University Transformation: a Global Leadership Perspective
  • Explore Content
    • Latest News
    • Newsletters
    • Letters
    • Free Reports and Guides
    • Professional Development
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle Store
    • Chronicle Intelligence
    • Jobs in Higher Education
    • Post a Job
  • Know The Chronicle
    • About Us
    • Vision, Mission, Values
    • DEI at The Chronicle
    • Write for Us
    • Work at The Chronicle
    • Our Reporting Process
    • Advertise With Us
    • Brand Studio
    • Accessibility Statement
  • Account and Access
    • Manage Your Account
    • Manage Newsletters
    • Individual Subscriptions
    • Group and Institutional Access
    • Subscription & Account FAQ
  • Get Support
    • Contact Us
    • Reprints & Permissions
    • User Agreement
    • Terms and Conditions
    • Privacy Policy
    • California Privacy Policy
    • Do Not Sell My Personal Information
1255 23rd Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037
© 2025 The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Chronicle of Higher Education is academe’s most trusted resource for independent journalism, career development, and forward-looking intelligence. Our readers lead, teach, learn, and innovate with insights from The Chronicle.
Follow Us
  • twitter
  • instagram
  • youtube
  • facebook
  • linkedin