Same Score, Different Door: The SAT, Geography, and the Limits of a Number

Same Score, Different Door: The SAT, Geography, and the Limits of a Number

By Lindsey Kundel, Editor-in-Chief, InGenius Prep

What an InGenius Prep webinar on holistic review reveals about test scores, and what the data can and cannot tell us

Imagine two students. The same 1520. The same transcript, the same calculus, the same long nights. One lives in Montana. The other lives in Texas.

In the webinar Decoding ‘Holistic’ Review: What Admissions Officers Actually Weigh When Scores Are Equal, InGenius Prep CEO Joel Butterly and Chief of Staff Matthew Rosenbaum, a former admissions officer at the University of Chicago, presented an analysis suggesting that these two students are not facing the same admissions office. By InGenius Prep’s calculation, the Montanan is roughly ten times better placed for a seat at the Ivy League, Stanford, or MIT.

The number is striking. It is also a number that must be handled with care, and the reasons why turn out to be as instructive as the number itself. This essay gathers everything the webinar had to say about the SAT, separates what InGenius Prep measured from what outside sources report, and tests both against the public record. Where our own figures are strong, we say so. Where they rest on thin samples or imperfect denominators, we say that too.

The core argument survives, though not always in the form the slides gave it. A test score opens a door. It does not decide what happens once you are through it. And the door, it turns out, is different depending on where you stand when you knock.

I. The requirement returns

Begin with the fact that makes all of this urgent again: the SAT is back.

For several years after 2020, families could reasonably treat testing as optional at the most selective schools. That era is ending. The webinar’s policy slides captured a moment of transition, and in the months since, that moment has largely passed.

Penn reinstated its requirement beginning with the 2025–2026 cycle, for students applying for fall 2026 admission. Cornell did the same for fall 2026 enrollment, citing a multiyear study by its own task force on standardized testing. Johns Hopkins, which had once extended its test-optional period, announced that testing would be required beginning with the 2025–2026 application year. Yale, which in 2024 had built a “test-flexible” policy allowing AP or IB results in place of the SAT or ACT, announced in late May 2026 that it would again require the SAT or ACT.

The last two Ivy holdouts have now named their dates. Princeton announced in October 2025 that applicants would again be required to submit scores beginning with the 2027–2028 cycle. The university had reviewed five years of test-optional admissions and found stronger academic performance among students who chose to submit. Columbia followed in June 2026. It remains test-optional for the 2026–2027 cycle and will require scores beginning in August 2027, becoming the last Ivy League school to reinstate the requirement. Beyond the Ivies, Notre Dame will reinstate its requirement for the 2027–28 cycle, and Vanderbilt will require scores for the class entering in fall 2029.

Even the University of California, which the webinar’s tables list as test-blind, is reconsidering. More than 3,000 UC faculty members signed open letters urging a return to testing, citing weaker mathematical preparation among students since the system dropped the requirement in 2020. The UC Academic Senate has said it will deliver a policy recommendation by the end of the 2026–27 academic year. As of this writing, the UC campuses remain test-blind.

Why the reversal? The explanations offered by the institutions themselves are strikingly consistent, and they are not what many families expect. The universities returning to testing do not describe it as a sorting mechanism for the privileged. They describe it as a way to find students they were missing.

MIT was early. When it reinstated its requirement in 2022, Dean of Admissions Stu Schmill said the exams were most helpful in identifying socioeconomically disadvantaged students who were well prepared for MIT but lacked access to advanced coursework or expensive enrichment. He was candid about what MIT’s research could not explain. He suspected the tests’ predictive power was likely related to “the centrality of mathematics” in an MIT education.

Dartmouth’s findings were sharper, and more uncomfortable. Faculty researchers were able to examine the scores of applicants who had chosen not to submit them. Many lower-income students, they found, had withheld scores that would have helped them. Those students believed their scores were too low. The admissions office would have read the same scores as evidence of success in a difficult environment. Test-optional did not level the field. It handed a strategic decision to the students least equipped to make it well.

When Yale reinstated testing in 2024, Dean of Undergraduate Admissions Jeremiah Quinlan said test scores were “the single greatest predictor of a student’s performance in Yale courses” across every model the university had built. Yale was equally explicit that a score is read against where it came from. For students at high schools with fewer resources, the university said, including a score, even one below Yale’s median range, gives the committee greater confidence in their likely success.

That last point matters for everything that follows. The number never arrives alone.

II. Eighty points wide

The webinar’s most quietly devastating slide is InGenius Prep’s analysis of federal IPEDS data on the middle 50 percent of SAT scores among enrolled students at eleven of the country’s most selective universities. The 25th percentiles cluster between 1490 and 1530. The 75th percentiles cluster between 1560 and 1580. At Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, and Yale, the entire middle band is eighty points wide. At Vanderbilt and Johns Hopkins, fifty.

“That is not a range an admissions officer can rank people inside,” the presenters wrote. “Once you are in it, your score has finished its job: it got your file read.”

The slide describes that eighty-point band as five percent of the SAT scale. That is true of the 1,600-point maximum. Measured against the 1,200 points the test actually spans, from 400 to 1600, it is closer to seven percent. Either way, a sliver.

National data show how few students occupy that sliver at all. According to College Board, 2,004,965 students in the high school class of 2025 took the SAT. Of those, 149,767, about 7 percent, scored between 1400 and 1600. The band in which the most selective colleges’ middle halves sit, roughly 1500 to 1580, is narrower still. For a sense of where admitted students land, Columbia reports that the median SAT score submitted by its fall 2024 cohort was 1540, and the median ACT was 35.

One caution about the IPEDS ranges themselves. During the test-optional years, published ranges reflected only students who chose to submit. Submitters skew high, so these ranges likely overstate the typical score of an enrolled class. As more schools return to requiring scores, the published ranges may shift.

The webinar illustrated the limits of a perfect score with a statistic that circulates widely in admissions circles: 69 percent of Stanford applicants with perfect scores are rejected. The figure has a real origin, but it needs context. Secondary sources trace it to a 2013 Stanford Magazine article reporting that 69 percent of applicants over the preceding five years with perfect scores were denied. Those were perfect 2400s on the pre-2016 version of the SAT. The figure is more than a decade old and describes a different test.

It also has a flip side. If 69 percent were rejected, 31 percent were admitted, at a time when Stanford’s overall admission rate was reported at roughly 6 to 8 percent. Read that way, a perfect score multiplied an applicant’s odds several times over.

Both readings are true, and the tension between them is the whole argument. A top score is necessary and insufficient at once. The webinar’s graphic put it plainly: below the threshold, admission is almost impossible; above it, admission becomes possible. Possible, not probable.

What, then, decides among students above the line? The most rigorous outside answer comes from the economists Raj Chetty, David Deming, and John Friedman. They linked admissions records from highly selective colleges to federal tax data and to SAT and ACT scores. Their study defines “Ivy-Plus” as twelve institutions: the eight Ivies plus Stanford, MIT, Duke, and the University of Chicago. That is two more than the ten-college group InGenius Prep uses.

Their central finding: children from families in the top 1 percent are more than twice as likely to attend an Ivy-Plus college as middle-class children with comparable test scores. Two-thirds of that gap comes from higher admission rates for high-income students with the same scores. The remaining third comes from differences in who applies and who enrolls. The admissions advantage traced to three sources: preferences for the children of alumni, weight placed on non-academic credentials, and athletic recruitment. Deming, discussing the research, said legacy applicants are roughly five times more likely than non-legacy applicants with the same SAT score to be admitted to the college their parents attended.

The finding that should most reframe how families think about the test is this one. The factors behind the high-income advantage were uncorrelated or negatively correlated with outcomes after college. SAT and ACT scores, by contrast, were highly predictive of them. The score, so often cast as the villain of selective admissions, turns out to be one of the few elements of the file that measures what colleges say they want to measure.

The webinar also examined what the top seventy universities report weighing in their Common Data Set filings. InGenius Prep’s tally found that 67 of the 70 place the personal essay in their highest category of importance, compared with only 8 of the 70 for test scores. That figure predates most of the reinstatements described above, and it may understate the weight tests carry at schools that now require them. The presenters were careful about what it does and does not mean. “That is not an argument for skipping the test,” they wrote. “It is an argument about where the marginal hour goes once the threshold is cleared.”

That sentence may be the most useful single piece of advice in the webinar. We will return to it.

III. Where you live is part of your application

Now to the heart of the matter, and to the question families actually ask: does being from here help me, or hurt me?

InGenius Prep’s approach was elegant. Take ten highly selective universities (the eight Ivies, plus Stanford and MIT), which together enroll 15,108 American first-year students a year. Comparing a state’s share of those seats to its share of all high school graduates, the presenters argued, “proves nothing, because most graduates were never candidates.” The fairer comparison is to students who could plausibly compete.

So the denominator was built from College Board’s state-by-state reports: students who scored 1400 or above on the SAT, 103,593 of them across 47 states. Divide a state’s share of the seats by its share of those scorers, and the result approximates seats per qualified student. Above 1.0, a state’s high scorers are punching above their weight. Below 1.0, in the webinar’s phrase, “they are losing ground before anyone reads a file.”

The results are arresting:

• New York: 1.70 times its share of seats.
• California: 0.97, essentially parity.
• Illinois: 0.64.
• Virginia: 0.57.
• Texas: 0.45. Texas produced 12,310 students at 1400 or above, nearly 12 percent of the pool, and holds 5.3 percent of the seats.
• North Dakota: 5.12.
• Wyoming: 4.91.
• Montana: 4.33.

Set Montana against Texas and the ratio of their indices, 4.33 to 0.45, comes to roughly ten. “Two students with the same 1520, the same transcript and the same activities are not facing the same admissions office,” the presenters wrote, “and the one in Texas is not imagining it.”

We rechecked this arithmetic, and it holds: each state’s share and ratio reproduces from the published counts within rounding. The direction of the finding is plausible. Its magnitude, particularly at the top of the table, requires more scrutiny than a slide allows. There are six reasons, and each is itself a lesson in how test data work.

First, the SAT is not the only test. Montana administers the ACT to every junior as its required statewide assessment. North Dakota and Wyoming are also reported among the states that require the ACT. In these states, students who sit for the SAT are a small, self-selected subset. A Montanan who scored a 35 on the ACT does not appear in a denominator built from SAT reports.

Our own arithmetic points to the scale of the problem. Montana’s 0.22 percent of 15,108 seats is about 33 enrolled students, set against 53 Montanans who scored 1400 or above on the SAT. North Dakota’s 0.10 percent is about 15 students, against 21 SAT high scorers. It is implausible that roughly two-thirds of a state’s qualified students enroll at these ten colleges. It is far more likely that the SAT counts capture only part of each state’s qualified pool. The three states at the top of the table are precisely the three most exposed to this distortion. Their multipliers, and the Montana-to-Texas comparison built on one of them, should be read as upper bounds, not measurements.

Second, SAT participation varies for reasons that have nothing to do with talent. College Board reports that 68 percent of SAT takers in the class of 2025 took the test during the school day. In some states the SAT serves as the state accountability assessment for eleventh graders: Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Indiana, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Rhode Island, and West Virginia. Elsewhere, districts and families decide. A state that tests every junior will surface more high scorers, including students who might never have registered on their own. College Board itself advises caution in using scores to compare states, because participation and test-taker populations differ.

The ground is also moving. Illinois used the SAT as its state assessment from 2017 until its contract with College Board ended on June 30, 2024. It moved to the ACT beginning in spring 2025. That timing suggests the class of 2025, who were juniors in spring 2024, was likely the last Illinois cohort tested universally on the SAT. If so, SAT-only counts for Illinois will fall sharply in future years, and any index built on them will shift for reasons unrelated to admissions.

Third, the published counts reflect each student’s most recent score, not their best. College Board’s annual reports summarize the most recent score for students who tested more than once. A student who scored 1420 in March and 1390 in June is counted below 1400. This likely undercounts high scorers everywhere, though not necessarily evenly across states.

Fourth, the seats are enrolled students, not admitted students. The seat counts come from IPEDS data on the home states of enrolled first-year students. The index therefore blends two different things: whether colleges admitted a state’s students, and whether those students chose to attend. That distinction matters most for a state like Texas, with a strong in-state pull. Texas law requires that 75 percent of UT Austin’s in-state first-year students be admitted automatically on the basis of class rank. Some share of Texas’s low index almost certainly reflects Texans who were admitted elsewhere and chose to stay. We cannot say how large that share is. Chetty and his colleagues found that a third of the income gap at Ivy-Plus colleges came from differences in who applied and who enrolled rather than from admission decisions. There is good reason to expect geography to behave similarly.

Fifth, the SAT counts and the enrollment counts may not describe the same cohort. The SAT figures are for the class of 2025. The webinar’s notes identify its Alaska enrollment figures as coming from the 2022 IPEDS cycle. If the state index draws on enrollment data from a different year than the test data, it compares two different groups of students. That is a common and often unavoidable compromise with public data, but readers should know it.

Sixth, the national denominator needs reconciling. InGenius Prep’s count of 103,593 students at 1400 or above comes from 47 state reports. College Board’s total-group report counts 149,767 in the same range. The difference, about 46,000 students, likely reflects test-takers outside those 47 states, including international students. We have not yet confirmed this.

None of this makes the geographic effect disappear. It makes it harder to size. And the webinar’s second geographic analysis, which addresses the ACT problem directly, suggests the effect is real.

In that model, InGenius Prep estimated each state’s pool of students scoring 1500 or above on the SAT or 34 or above on the ACT. It removed each college’s home-state premium and excluded Cornell’s state-contract colleges. The gaps remain wide, though they are smaller than ten to one. By this measure, a high scorer in West Virginia is 3.9 times as likely as one in Texas to hold one of these seats, and twice as likely as one in New York. The presenters flag that the West Virginia and Maine results rest on thin samples: 142 and 314 students, respectively, scored 1400 or above on the SAT. Because the denominators in this analysis are estimated rather than counted, the results are a model, not a census.

Alaska offers the most human-scale illustration. InGenius Prep estimates that 41 Alaskan students score above 1500 in a graduating class of 8,058, and 27 enroll at one of the ten colleges. At a typical yield near 72 percent, that implies roughly 37 admits. “Two thirds of the qualified students in Alaska end up at one of these ten colleges,” the presenters wrote. “The pool is not competitive because there is barely a pool.” The webinar’s own notes call the estimate unstable: only 106 Alaskans scored 1400 or above on the SAT, and the 41 is modeled rather than observed.

What survives the scrutiny, then, is a directional truth and a mechanism.

The directional truth is that scarcity is an advantage. A high scorer from a state that produces many high scorers competes in a crowded room. The precise multiplier is uncertain. The pattern, visible in both of InGenius Prep’s analyses, is consistent.

The mechanism is the reading process itself. As the webinar described it, applications at selective colleges are often sorted by region and assigned to an admissions officer responsible for that territory, who then decides whom to advocate for in committee. At Columbia, according to the presentation, a single admissions officer was assigned to read every application from Massachusetts, one of the most heavily represented states in the class, along with Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont. “You are compared to other applicants from your region,” the webinar concluded. “That is your competition.”

Put the two together and the logic becomes clear. The officer reading Texas files will see many 1520s. The officer reading Montana files will see few. The same number lands differently in each stack. That is not because anyone discounts it. In one stack it is ordinary, and in the other it is rare.

The webinar’s summary is bracing: “You cannot change where you live, and if you are in Texas, Virginia or Illinois nobody will tell you that your 1520 is worth less than the same score three states over.” We would refine one word. The score is not worth less. As evidence of academic readiness, it carries the same information anywhere. What it cannot do, in a crowded region, is set a student apart.

IV. The score in its setting

If geography shapes how a score is read at the level of the state, the high school shapes it at the level of the file.

Admissions offices have tools for exactly this. College Board’s Landscape resource allows participating colleges to see an applicant’s test score alongside the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentile scores of SAT takers at that student’s high school, together with information about the school and neighborhood. A 1450 from a school where the median score is 1050 and a 1450 from a school where the median is 1400 are the same number. They are not the same achievement, and a reader with that context in view will see the difference. This is what Yale meant in saying that a below-median score can strengthen an application from an under-resourced school. It is also what Dartmouth meant in describing its requirement as “contextualized testing,” one factor but never the primary one.

InGenius Prep’s analysis of University of California admissions data adds a striking coda, one that complicates any simple story about tests. UC Berkeley was test-blind throughout the period examined; scores played no role. Yet admission rates for out-of-state applicants varied widely by high school.

Across the entering classes of 2022 through 2025, Coral Reef Senior High School in Miami saw 21 of 84 applicants admitted. That is 25 percent, more than five times the out-of-state baseline of 4.6 percent. Memorial Senior High School in Houston sent 132 applications over the same four years, and Bellaire High School sent 124. Neither school shows a recorded admit. UC suppresses counts below three, so a recorded zero may mean one or two.

We do not know what produced those differences, and the data cannot tell us. The pattern shows only that outcomes cluster by school even when scores are removed entirely. The sorting families fear is not produced by the SAT alone.

V. What this means for your family

The webinar identified four critical factors in standing out: threshold grades and scores, diversity, leadership, and a consistent application persona. Testing comes first for a reason. It is the gate; everything else happens behind it. Drawing on InGenius Prep’s analysis and the outside record together, here is how that translates into decisions.

Take the test, and plan for it early. With every Ivy League school requiring scores by the 2027–28 cycle, and much of the selective landscape moving the same way, the question for most students aiming at highly selective schools is no longer whether to test. It is when, and how many times. A student who waits for policy clarity may run out of test dates. Even where testing has been optional, submission among enrolled students has been high. Yale, for instance, is reported to have had about 90 percent of its fall 2025 entering class include a score.

Know the threshold, then shift the marginal hour. Once a student sits solidly within a target school’s middle range, the webinar’s analysis suggests additional points buy little. The difference between a 1540 and a 1570 is a handful of questions. The difference between a forgettable application and a memorable one is everything the webinar spent its remaining time describing: the persona, the leadership, the coherence of the file. Students in states that produce many high scorers feel this most. There, a higher score will not rescue an undistinguished application from a stack full of equally high scores. Differentiation will.

Make the submission decision school by school, and do not let fear make it for you. The webinar’s case studies, drawn from the strategy reports InGenius Prep’s Former Admissions Officers wrote for real students, show this done deliberately. For one student with a 1580, the recommendation was to submit to every school that accepts or considers scores, with the note that the UCs, being test-blind, would not factor it in. For another, the recommendation was to report a 35 on the ACT and not report a 1520 on the SAT. The Dartmouth findings are the cautionary counterpart. The students most likely to withhold a helpful score are often the ones who most need it read. Before withholding, compare a score not only to a college’s overall range but to what is typical at your own high school, because that is increasingly the comparison the reader will make.

Understand your state’s testing landscape. If your state gives every junior the ACT, the ACT may be your natural test, and colleges that require scores accept either. If your state has recently changed its test, as Illinois has, the free school-day exam may no longer be the one you would choose. And if you live in a state that produces many high scorers, expect your score to be read among many peers, and plan your application’s distinctiveness accordingly.

Remember that your intended major is another denominator. The webinar’s companion analysis of majors, a subject for a future piece, found the same logic operating inside universities. At the University of Illinois, InGenius Prep’s review of the university’s published figures showed an overall first-year admit rate of 36.6 percent for 2025 entry, against 7.4 percent for applicants who put computer science first. Geography and major compound. A computer science applicant from a state crowded with high scorers is competing in one of the most crowded rooms there is.

VI. The number and the person

It would be easy to read all this as fatalism. Your state is too crowded, your major too popular, your score too common. That is not the lesson, and it is not what the webinar intended.

The lesson is that a test score is a precise instrument with a narrow purpose. It tells a reader, with more reliability than most things in the file, whether a student is academically ready. That is why, after a five-year experiment, the country’s most selective universities have come back to it, and why they insist, almost in unison, on reading it in context. It is also why, once the score clears the bar, it goes quiet. Eighty points wide. A handful of questions between the 25th percentile and the 75th.

What speaks after that is harder to measure and easier to shape. The webinar’s own words are a fitting place to end: “Scores and grades are a threshold. Clearing it gets your file read by a human being; it does not get you admitted, because everyone else in the pile cleared it too.”

The student in Texas cannot move to Montana. But she can understand exactly what her 1520 is doing for her, and what it cannot do. Then she can spend her next hour on the part of the application only she can write.

Notes on the Data

InGenius Prep figures. Unless otherwise attributed, the statistics in this piece come from InGenius Prep’s analysis as presented in the webinar Decoding ‘Holistic’ Review. They are:

• The state index of seats per qualified student.
• The SAT/ACT model with home-state premiums removed.
• The Alaska estimate.
• The middle-50-percent SAT ranges.
• The Common Data Set tally.
• The UC Berkeley source-school figures.
• The University of Illinois admit rates.
• The case-study recommendations.

The underlying public sources, as identified in the presentation, are College Board state SAT reports for the class of 2025; IPEDS enrollment and admissions surveys; Common Data Set filings; UC Admissions by Source School; and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign First-Year Admit Rates.

Arithmetic in this piece. We recalculated the state shares and index ratios from the counts shown in the presentation, and all reproduce within rounding. Three figures are our own calculations from InGenius Prep’s published numbers:

• The ratio of Montana’s index to Texas’s (4.33 ÷ 0.45 ≈ 9.6).
• The implied enrolled-student counts for Montana (about 33) and North Dakota (about 15), from each state’s seat share applied to 15,108 seats.
• The seven-percent figure for an eighty-point band on the SAT’s 400–1600 range.

Known limitations.

• The state index uses SAT counts only, which understates qualified students in states that test primarily with the ACT.
• The College Board counts reflect most recent rather than highest scores.
• Seats are enrolled students, not admitted students.
• The SAT and enrollment data may come from different years.
• The SAT/ACT model and the Alaska figures use estimated, not observed, denominators, and several states rest on small samples.
• The Stanford perfect-score figure is more than a decade old, describes the pre-2016 SAT, and is drawn from secondary reporting of the original article.
• The Common Data Set tally reflects filings that predate many recent test reinstatements.

References

InGenius Prep

InGenius Prep. Decoding ‘Holistic’ Review: What Admissions Officers Actually Weigh When Scores Are Equal. Webinar presentation by Joel Butterly and Matthew Rosenbaum. [Date to be added.]

Testing policy

Columbia Undergraduate Admissions. “Testing Policy Update.” June 2026. https://undergrad.admissions.columbia.edu/testing-policy-update

Columbia Daily Spectator. “Columbia Becomes Last Ivy to Reinstate Standardized Test Scores Requirement Post-COVID.” June 12, 2026. https://www.columbiaspectator.com/news/2026/06/12/columbia-becomes-last-ivy-to-reinstate-standardized-test-scores-requirement-post-covid/

Higher Ed Dive. “Columbia Reinstates SAT, ACT Requirements for 2027-28.” June 15, 2026. https://www.highereddive.com/news/columbia-reinstates-sat-act-requirements-for-2027-28/822957/

Princeton Alumni Weekly. “Princeton Admissions Will Again Require Standardized Tests in 2027.” https://paw.princeton.edu/article/princeton-admissions-will-again-require-standardized-tests-2027

Compass Education Group. “Testing Policies in the Spotlight.” https://www.compassprep.com/testing-spotlight/

Empowerly. “Johns Hopkins Reinstates Standardized Tests: What You Need to Know.” June 2026. https://empowerly.com/applications/johns-hopkins-reinstates-standardized-tests/

Empowerly. “SAT/ACT Now Required. Is the Era of Test-Optional Admissions Over?” June 4, 2026. https://empowerly.com/blog/sat-act-requirements-at-top-colleges

Test Ninjas. “Yale Requires SAT or ACT Again, Ending Test-Flexible Policy.” May 29, 2026. https://test-ninjas.com/yale-requires-sat-act-again

Crimson Education. “What Colleges Require the SAT/ACT Scores in 2026/27?” https://www.crimsoneducation.org/us/blog/colleges-that-require-sat-act

Yale News. “Yale Announces New Test-Flexible Admissions Policy.” February 22, 2024. https://news.yale.edu/2024/02/22/yale-announces-new-test-flexible-admissions-policy

WTOP / Associated Press. “Yale Joins Another Ivy League School to Again Require Standardized Test Scores amid Equity Concern.” February 2024. https://wtop.com/education/2024/02/yale-joins-another-ivy-league-school-to-again-require-standardized-test-scores-amid-equity-concern/

MIT News. “Q&A: Stuart Schmill on MIT’s Decision to Reinstate the SAT/ACT Requirement.” March 28, 2022. https://news.mit.edu/2022/stuart-schmill-sat-act-requirement-0328

Boston.com. Coverage of MIT’s reinstatement of the SAT/ACT requirement. March 29, 2022. https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2022/03/29/mit-sat-act-requirement/

The College Fix. “‘Convinced by the Data’: Dartmouth College Reinstates SAT Requirement.” February 2024. https://www.thecollegefix.com/bulletin-board/convinced-by-the-data-dartmouth-college-reinstates-sat-requirement/

NPR. “After a Pause for the Pandemic, Dartmouth Will Again Require SAT and ACT Scores.” February 2024. https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1229405722

KQED Forum. “Should the UCs Reinstate the SAT?” July 16, 2026. https://www.kqed.org/forum/2010101914438/should-the-ucs-reinstate-the-sat

EdSource. “University of California Review of Standardized Testing in Admissions Expected by End of Academic Year.” 2026. https://edsource.org/updates/university-of-california-review-of-standardized-testing-in-admissions-expected-by-end-of-academic-year

Test data

College Board. 2025 SAT Suite of Assessments Annual Report: Total Group. 2025. https://reports.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/2025-total-group-sat-suite-of-assessments-annual-report.pdf

College Board Newsroom. “SAT Participation in the Class of 2025 Surpasses 2 Million Test Takers for the First Time Since 2020.” September 30, 2025. https://newsroom.collegeboard.org/sat-participation-class-2025-surpasses-2-million-test-takers-first-time-2020

College Board. “Landscape.” https://highered.collegeboard.org/recruitment-admissions/landscape

Montana Office of Public Instruction. “ACT Assessment Profile.” https://opi.mt.gov/Portals/182/Page%20Files/Statewide%20Testing/ACT%20Page/ACT_Assessment_Profile_Template.pdf

Progress Learning. “2025 Average ACT Scores by State.” https://progresslearning.com/news-blog/average-act-scores-by-state/

Capitol News Illinois. “Illinois Switching to ACT Exams for State Assessments.” July 2024. https://capitolnewsillinois.com/elections/illinois-switching-to-act-exams-for-state-assessments

Say Hello College. “Illinois Switches from SAT to ACT in 2025: Everything You Need to Know.” https://sayhellocollege.com/?p=19718

Research and admissions practice

Chetty, Raj, David J. Deming, and John N. Friedman. “Diversifying Society’s Leaders? The Determinants and Causal Effects of Admission to Highly Selective Private Colleges.” NBER Working Paper 31492, 2023. https://www.nber.org/papers/w31492

Opportunity Insights. “Diversifying Society’s Leaders?” Paper summary. https://opportunityinsights.org/paper/collegeadmissions/

The Harvard Crimson. “Harvard Professors Discuss Affirmative Action, Legacy Admissions at IOP Forum.” March 27, 2024. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/3/27/iop-chetty-deming-admissions/

PrepScholar. “College SAT Requirements: How to Find What SAT Score You Need” (reporting a 2013 Stanford Magazine article). https://blog.prepscholar.com/college-sat-requirements-how-to-find-what-sat-score-you-need

University of Texas at Austin News. “Automatic Admissions Threshold Remains at 6% for UT Austin.” https://news.utexas.edu/?p=138466