The short answer
At the selective end, yes. Harvard announced a return to required testing in April 2024, following Yale, Dartmouth, Brown, MIT, Georgetown, and UT Austin, and the rest of the market has been following the same direction since. The schools' stated reason is that a test score is the one credential that reads the same coming out of any high school, which is why it helps identify strong students at under-resourced ones. If your student is applying anywhere selective, plan on submitting a score.
A lot of families made a plan in 2021 that assumed testing was on its way out. That plan needs revisiting, and the schools themselves are why.
What actually happened
Colleges dropped test requirements in 2020 when testing centers closed. Most of them said the pause would run for years, and several told the classes of 2029 and 2030 explicitly that scores would stay optional through their cycles.
Then Yale, Dartmouth, Brown, MIT, Georgetown, and UT Austin reversed, and on 11 April 2024 Harvard posted a letter from the dean titled “Return to Required Testing,” moving the change up two years ahead of its own stated re-evaluation date. When the most-copied admissions office in the country reverses, the rest of the market tends to follow, and it has been following since.
The reason they gave, which is not the one people expected
The public assumption was that requiring tests favors wealthy families who can buy prep. The schools argued close to the opposite.
Their position is that a test score is the only credential on an application that means the same thing regardless of where a student went to high school. A transcript doesn’t travel — an A at a well-funded suburban school and an A at a rural public school are not the same measurement, and neither are the internships, research placements, and summer programs that a family’s budget can supply. A score is comparable across all of it, so withholding one removes the piece of evidence most likely to surface a strong student from a school the admissions office doesn’t already know.
Research by Raj Chetty, David Deming, and John Friedman, covering more than 400 institutions and about 3.5 million undergraduates and reported by the Harvard Gazette, found the same thing: standardized tests were an effective tool for identifying promising students at less-resourced high schools, particularly alongside other academic credentials. Colleges also found that students who had submitted scores went on to do better on campus, with lower dropout and transfer rates.
What it means for how a file gets read
At a school reading tens of thousands of applications, the score functions as a gate rather than as a decision. Applications below a threshold largely don’t get the full read, because there isn’t time to give one to everybody. A strong score doesn’t admit your student. It gets the rest of the application looked at.
That’s the practical stake, and it’s the same reason I’d rather a junior finish the test early than optimize anything else first. Everything that actually differentiates an application — the projects, the essays, the specificity — only matters after the file survives the first pass.
If your student was counting on test-optional
They aren’t behind by much. A score is the fastest-moving number on the whole application: a Boosted Brains sprint runs four to eight weeks against one test date, and most students plan two of them. That’s a fall and a winter, not a lost year.
Pick a test date, take a realistic practice test at home to find the true starting point, and build backward from there. The families who get hurt by this reversal are the ones still waiting to see whether it sticks.
