"Test-optional" is the policy under which a US university accepts undergraduate applications without requiring SAT or ACT scores. Students may submit scores if they wish, in which case the scores are considered alongside other application materials. If they choose not to submit, the application is evaluated on transcripts, recommendations, essays, and activities, and the school's official position is that non-submitters are not penalized. The policy is distinct from "test-blind" (the school will not consider scores at all, even if submitted) and from "test-flexible" (the school accepts multiple test types, such as SAT, ACT, AP, or IB results, but requires testing of some kind). The editorial returns to these distinctions in detail.
Test-optional existed long before the pandemic. Bowdoin College became the first US institution to make standardized tests optional in 1969, citing concerns that the SAT measured socioeconomic privilege more than academic readiness. Bates College followed in 1984; its 20-year study found the gaps in graduation rate and GPA between submitters and non-submitters were negligible. Wake Forest joined in 2008, the only top-30 national university with a test-optional policy at the time. By 2019, more than a thousand US four-year colleges had adopted test-optional, mostly small liberal arts colleges and regional universities making a principled argument about access and predictive validity.
The pandemic changed the scale. With test centers closed and access uncertain, universities adopted test-optional emergency policies in 2020-21 to avoid excluding entire applicant cohorts. By the fall of 2021, more than 1,775 institutions were test-optional, including effectively all of the most selective US universities. Many extended the policy through 2024 as a temporary measure. The expansion was a logistical response to a public health emergency, not a principled extension of the pre-pandemic movement, and that distinction explains why the pandemic adopters have begun to reverse while the pre-pandemic adopters have not.
Beginning with MIT in 2022 and accelerating in 2024, a wave of selective universities began reversing the policy. That wave is the subject of the rest of this editorial. The reversing institutions cite internal research showing test scores predict academic performance, including for low-income and first-generation applicants, more reliably than they had assumed during the pandemic. The institutions remaining test-optional point to their own data and to the equity argument that motivated the pre-pandemic movement. The editorial does not adjudicate between these positions; it maps the landscape so families can navigate it.
For families building a US university target list in the 2026-27 application cycle, the test-optional landscape is no longer a single answer. It is an institution-by-institution navigation. Six of the eight Ivy League universities now require standardized test scores. So do MIT, Caltech, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Texas at Austin. Yale's policy is technically test-flexible, accepting IB or AP exam results in lieu of SAT or ACT, but it is substantively a testing requirement: every applicant submits something. Penn announced its reversal in February 2025. Princeton announced in October 2025 that it will follow with a reversal effective for the 2027-28 cycle.
At the same time, more than two thousand US four-year colleges remain test-optional for the 2026-27 cycle. The University of California system is permanently test-blind by Board of Regents policy: UC campuses will not consider SAT or ACT scores even if voluntarily submitted. The selective liberal arts colleges (Pomona, Williams, Amherst, Bowdoin, Bates, Middlebury, Wesleyan, Swarthmore) have stayed test-optional through the reversal wave. Among major research universities, Columbia, Duke, Northwestern, the University of Chicago, Notre Dame, Vanderbilt, Washington University in St. Louis, Rice, Emory, and USC remain test-optional.
The framing parents most often arrive with, that "approximately half of US colleges are test-optional," is accurate as a headline and misleading as a guide to a target list. The 2,000 test-optional institutions are concentrated at lower-selectivity universities. The schools Taipei international and bilingual school families most often target are concentrated at the other end, where test requirements have largely been reinstated. A 2021-2023 mental model of "test-optional means tests don't matter much" reads the current target list against the wrong policy framework.
Yale's Dean of Admissions Jeremiah Quinlan explained the rationale for Yale's reversal in plain terms:
Test scores are the single greatest predictor of a student's performance in Yale courses. Yale News, February 22, 2024
This editorial maps the test-optional landscape as it stands for the 2026-27 application cycle: the structural framework for navigating a target list, the operational distinctions between test-required, test-optional, test-flexible, and test-blind, and the misconceptions that most often shape target-list decisions in unhelpful ways.
When test-optional comes up in conversations with families at Taipei international and bilingual schools, the question parents ask is the right one. Does our child need to take the SAT, given that test-optional is now standard. The answer they have absorbed is the answer that was correct in 2021 or 2022, when test-optional adoption was at its peak and the most selective US universities were extending or reaffirming the policy. Three or four admissions cycles later, the picture has shifted, and shifted unevenly: some of the schools families most often target have reversed, others have made test-optional permanent, and a meaningful third group has stated future reversals timed to younger applicants.
The visible signals that traditionally guide families (the FairTest aggregate count, the impression from US press coverage that test-optional is the default, the experience of older siblings who applied a few cycles ago) translate poorly to the question that matters now. The 2,000-plus test-optional institutions in the FairTest count are real, but the distribution is heavily skewed: test-optional is concentrated at lower-selectivity universities, while test-required is concentrated at the schools Taipei families most often pursue. A family whose target list spans Ivies, MIT, Stanford, the UC system, several test-optional research universities, and a handful of liberal arts colleges is navigating four different policy regimes in a single application season.
The families who navigate this best treat the target list itself as the unit of analysis. Once any school on the list is test-required, the testing decision is effectively made: the student is preparing for and submitting tests. The remaining question becomes how to deploy the same scores efficiently across schools with different policies.
Where the test-optional landscape stands as of September 2026. Figures drawn from FairTest's Fall 2026 tracker, individual university admissions pages, and reversal announcements through October 2025.
The preamble above sketched the broad arc; this section traces the specific reversals that produced the current landscape. Each row below is a moment in the wave that has reshaped admissions testing requirements at the schools Taipei families most often target.
The shape of the current landscape is the substance of the next section. Three structural patterns govern how a Taipei family should read the policy distribution against their target list.
The aggregate "approximately half of US colleges are test-optional" framing obscures the specific distribution. For Taipei families building target lists in the 2026-27 cycle, three structural patterns describe how policies cluster across the institutions you are most likely to consider.
For Taipei AP and IB Diploma students, this is operationally meaningful. Yale's policy, announced February 2024, requires every applicant to submit at least one of four test types: SAT, ACT, AP, or IB. A student with strong AP scores or strong predicted or final IB results can satisfy Yale's testing requirement without sitting the SAT or ACT separately. Carnegie Mellon's hybrid policy, announced August 2024, treats most undergraduate programs (Engineering, Tepper, Dietrich, Mellon College of Science, Humanities and Social Sciences) as test-flexible: applicants must submit scores but may choose from SAT, ACT, AP, IB, Cambridge A-Level, or French Baccalaureate. CMU's School of Computer Science remains strictly SAT or ACT; the College of Fine Arts is test-optional.
The practical consequence for Taipei AP and IB families. If Yale and CMU are on the target list and the rest of the list is uniformly test-optional, a student with strong AP or IB results may not need the SAT or ACT at all. If any other Ivy or any other test-required research university is on the list, the student is preparing for the SAT or ACT, and the Yale and CMU policies become a useful efficiency rather than a determining factor. Either way, students with strong AP or IB performance have an additional pathway at exactly the schools where the testing requirement might otherwise feel highest-stakes. This is the kind of operational distinction that the headline "Yale reversed test-optional" coverage typically obscures.
One caveat. English proficiency testing (TOEFL, IELTS, Duolingo) is a separate requirement at most US universities for non-native English speakers, independent of the SAT/ACT/AP/IB requirement. Yale, for example, requires English proficiency demonstration for non-native speakers with fewer than two years of English-medium schooling. Taipei bilingual school students whose schooling has been in English typically will not need TOEFL; international school students should verify the policy at each target school.
Among the 25 research universities Taipei families most often target, twelve have reinstated testing requirements for the 2026-27 cycle and ten remain test-optional. Schools that reversed cluster at the top of the selectivity distribution: MIT (March 2022), Dartmouth (February 2024), Yale (February 2024, test-flexible), Brown (March 2024), Harvard (April 2024), Caltech (April 2024), UT Austin (March 2024), Stanford (June 2024), Cornell (April 2024), Johns Hopkins (August 2024), Penn (February 2025). Princeton announced in October 2025 that it will reverse for the 2027-28 cycle.
Schools that remain test-optional include Columbia, Duke, Northwestern, UChicago, Notre Dame, Vanderbilt, Washington University in St. Louis, Rice, Emory, and USC. Several have signaled the policy is intentional. Columbia has made test-optional permanent. Notre Dame reaffirmed in November 2025. Wake Forest, the only pre-pandemic top-30 national university to have adopted test-optional, has not reversed 18 years into its policy. The "wave" framing is accurate at the top of the selectivity distribution; it would mislead a family applying to UChicago, Notre Dame, or Wake Forest into expecting a policy change that is not signaled.
None of the most selective liberal arts colleges have followed the research-university reversal wave. Pomona made its test-optional policy permanent in November 2023, before the wave began. Williams, Amherst, Bowdoin (test-optional since 1969), Bates (test-optional since 1984), Middlebury, Wesleyan, and Swarthmore all remain test-optional for the 2026-27 cycle. Swarthmore explicitly reaffirmed test-optional in November 2025 for at least five more years.
For Taipei families whose target list spans both research universities and liberal arts colleges, this means navigating two policy regimes in a single season. A student preparing for the SAT to satisfy MIT's or Yale's requirement is also applying to Williams or Pomona where the SAT is genuinely optional. At the LAC tier, the decision is whether to submit a strong score voluntarily, not whether to test at all. The test-required research universities have already made the testing decision.
All nine undergraduate-admitting University of California campuses (UCLA, UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, UC Davis, UC Santa Barbara, UC Santa Cruz, UC Irvine, UC Riverside, UC Merced) are permanently test-blind by UC Board of Regents policy. The California State University system is also test-free. Test-blind is operationally different from test-optional: at a test-blind institution, the school will not consider SAT or ACT scores even if voluntarily submitted. A Taipei student with a 1550 SAT score has the same testing context at any UC campus as a student with no SAT score. The score has no marginal value in a UC application.
The UC system, particularly UCLA, UC Berkeley, and UC San Diego, is among the most frequently targeted public university systems for Taipei applicants. Families with UCs on the target list should understand that testing-side investment serves the rest of the list, not the UCs.
The four policy terms are operationally distinct. Confusing them is one of the most common ways families misread their target list. The table below summarizes the practical differences. The paragraphs that follow address the questions families actually ask about how each policy operates inside an admissions office.
The most contested operational question across the test-optional landscape is whether not submitting at a test-optional school disadvantages an applicant. Universities' official position, uniformly, is that non-submitters are not penalized: the application is evaluated on transcripts, recommendations, essays, and activities. Admit-rate data complicates this position. Across multiple selective test-optional schools, students who submitted scores were admitted at substantially higher rates than students who did not. At Cornell's College of Arts and Sciences during a test-optional cycle, one analysis found submitters comprised 24% of applicants but 50% of admits and 62% of enrollees. Yale and Brown both cited similar internal patterns when announcing their reversals.
The interpretation is contested. The gap partly reflects self-selection: students with stronger scores submit, students with weaker scores do not, so submitters begin as a stronger applicant pool. Submitted scores then provide an additional signal beyond that selection effect. What the data does not support is the position that not submitting is strictly neutral at selective test-optional schools. Dartmouth's and Brown's institutional research found that some low-income students were withholding competitive scores, hurting their own chances. The practical heuristic: if a student's score is competitive for the school, submitting is likely a positive. If the score is below the school's typical admitted-student range, the test-optional policy provides genuine flexibility.
Most major selective US universities now apply their test-optional policies equally to domestic and international applicants. The remaining nuance for Taipei families is that the competitive context differs. International applicants represent a smaller portion of the enrolled class at most US universities, and admissions officers reading applications from Taipei international and bilingual schools have fewer cross-national academic comparators than they do for domestic applicants from US high schools they evaluate every year. Submitted test scores are one of the clearest such comparators. The policy terms operate the same way for international applicants; the implicit weight of a submitted score can be higher in the international pool. For Taipei IB Diploma students applying to Yale or CMU non-CS programs, the structural advice is in the callout above. For all other Taipei applicants to selective test-optional schools, submitting a competitive score is more likely to help than hurt.
The patterns below describe general approaches that, in our experience, leave families with target-list decisions less calibrated to the 2026-27 landscape than they could be.
The test-optional landscape interacts with each Taipei school's typical college destination patterns. Where TAS, KCIS, TES, and Fuhsing's Bilingual Division graduates apply shapes which policies most often govern the decisions Harland sees families navigate.
A typical Taipei target list of eight US universities will commonly span all four policy categories: a test-required Ivy or two, a test-flexible Yale or CMU, a test-optional Duke or Vanderbilt, and a test-blind UC campus. The pattern below summarizes how each Taipei school's application pattern interacts with the landscape.
Harland's role with US-bound families is academic preparation, not admissions consulting. Within that scope, we help families think through how the test-optional landscape shapes the academic and testing decisions in front of them, so SAT, AP, or IB work serves the target list they are building.
Harland's free assessment session is the starting point for our US-bound students. We assess where the student is academically, discuss the target list and the testing decisions it implies under the current policy landscape, and explain how our 1-on-1 program would integrate with the family's broader application strategy. No commitment required.
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