If you've been following college admissions for the last few years, you've watched testing policies bounce around in ways that are genuinely hard to keep up with. Most colleges went test-optional during the pandemic, and many stayed that way. A small but growing group of schools has reversed course and now requires tests again. A handful refuse to look at scores at all. And then there's the messiest category of all: schools that say tests are optional but mean "basically required."
Here's where things stand right now, what the categories actually mean in practice, and what you need to know.
01The categories, briefly
Test-required means exactly what it sounds like. Your application is incomplete without an SAT or ACT score, and the admissions office will use the score as part of its evaluation. This was the default for decades. It went away during COVID. It's coming back at many schools, especially those that are more selective.
Test-optional means you can choose whether to submit a score. If you do, it gets considered alongside the rest of your application. If you don't, the admissions office is supposed to evaluate you without it.
Test-blind (sometimes called "test-free") means the admissions office won't look at your score at all, even if you submit one. This is the rarest of the three categories, but it's the policy in place across the entire University of California system, which alone covers something like 250,000 applications a year.
The lines between these categories sound clean. In practice, it's less obvious.
02Schools going back to required
The trend over the last two cycles has been clear: selective schools, particularly the most selective ones, have been reinstating their testing requirements. Eleven of the top fifteen national universities in the US News rankings are now test-required, including many big names, like Harvard and Stanford. A number of other programs have joined them, and more are on the way. Princeton announced it will return to required testing starting with the 2027-2028 admissions cycle. At this point, Columbia is the only Ivy still test-optional.
The schools that have come back to required testing have generally cited the same reason: internal reviews of their admissions data showed that test scores were actually useful, particularly for identifying students from under-resourced schools who would succeed at their institutions. MIT was one of the earliest and most explicit about this. Their admissions office published research showing that, without test scores, they had a harder time identifying students who would do well, especially students from high schools the admissions office didn't already know well.
It's a bit counterintuitive, especially since the argument for test-optional admissions was often framed as a matter of fairness, particularly for students from less advantaged backgrounds. The argument from the schools that have reversed course is essentially the same: test scores, used carefully, help them identify students who might otherwise be overlooked. Whether you agree with that framing or not, the result is what matters for families planning college applications, and the result is that more selective schools want test scores than at any point since 2020.
03Texas schools
If you're applying from DFW, the most important policy shift is at UT Austin, which returned to required testing for fall 2025 admissions. Most other Texas schools, including Texas A&M, Rice, TCU, and SMU, remain officially test-optional, and none has announced plans to follow UT back to required testing. A&M has explicitly extended its test-optional policy through the 2026-2027 cycle, and Houston has committed to staying optional through June 2030.
That said, "test-optional" in Texas usually comes with caveats worth knowing. Rice "strongly recommends" submitting scores, which means "we really want a test score." Baylor and Texas Tech use test scores in scholarship and merit aid decisions, so a strong score can translate directly into tuition dollars even when it isn't required for admission. The Texas automatic admission rules add another wrinkle: students in the top 10% of their high school class (top 5% for UT Austin) get guaranteed admission to Texas public universities regardless of scores, but that guarantee only covers admission, not competitive majors, honors colleges, or merit aid. For the average DFW student applying broadly, a real SAT or ACT score is either required, strongly recommended, or financially valuable at almost every school they're likely to consider.
04The elephant in the room: test-optional schools
This is the largest category, but also the most confusing. Most colleges in the country, roughly 2,000 of them, are still test-optional. The Common App reports that only about 5% of its member colleges currently require test scores. So if test-required schools are the minority, why bother taking a test for a test-optional school?
At least at selective test-optional schools, scores aren't really optional. They're just not required. Those are not the same thing.
The clearest public statement on this came from Yale's Dean of Undergraduate Admissions, Jeremiah Quinlan, when Yale announced its return to required testing. Quinlan said he had become "more and more convinced that we weren't being honest about the reality of our admissions process to students and parents." His view was that students who weren't submitting test scores were inadvertently hurting their chances of admission. Calling the policy test-optional, he said, felt disingenuous. In the same podcast, he said that the Yale admissions committee was denying 98% of students applying without test scores, which definitely makes scores seem more "required" than "optional."
That's an admissions dean at one of the most selective universities in the country saying, on the record, that the test-optional policy at his school was misleading families. This isn't true everywhere: at some schools, optional really does mean optional, but as a general rule, the more selective a school is, the more it will rely on test scores.
The mechanics of why this happens are not mysterious. Admissions officers reviewing thousands of applications want as much information as they can reasonably get when they're making a decision. A strong test score isn't the most important thing in your file, but when an admissions officer is choosing between two strong applicants, more data points in your favor are better than fewer. Several admissions consultants have published data showing that at many selective test-optional schools, students who submit scores are admitted at meaningfully higher rates than students who don't, even after controlling for the obvious explanation that stronger applicants are more likely to submit scores in the first place.
The practical takeaway is that "test-optional" at a selective school often means "we'd rather see a score, but we'll consider you without one." It does not mean tests don't matter.
05What about test-blind schools?
The last category is test-blind schools, and the biggest example by far is the University of California system. UC went test-blind in 2021, after a lawsuit, and the policy has held since. UC will not look at SAT or ACT scores during admissions review at any of its nine undergraduate campuses, including Berkeley, UCLA, San Diego, Davis, and Irvine.
If you're applying only to UC schools and none of the other categories above, you can skip the test. But there are two important footnotes.
First, UC's own admissions site says that submitted scores can still be used for course placement after a student enrolls, and in some cases for fulfilling minimum eligibility requirements. So a student who's confident in a strong score might still want to submit it, not for admissions, but for what happens after admissions.
Second, the UC policy is becoming an internal point of contention at the UC system itself. A recent report from a UC San Diego Senate-Administration working group found that about one in eight first-year UC students did not meet high school math standards on placement exams despite having strong high school math grades. That's a roughly 30-fold increase since 2020, when test-blind admissions started. UC's own faculty have been publishing increasingly direct critiques of the policy, arguing that without test scores, the admissions process has become harder to do fairly, not easier. Whether the policy will hold for another decade or get revisited is genuinely an open question, though for now, applicants should plan around the current rules.
06So do you need to take a test?
The honest answer, for almost any student reading this, is probably yes. Here's why.
If a single school on your list is test-required, you need a score. That's the simplest case, and it's increasingly common, because the trend toward required testing has accelerated for two straight cycles.
If your schools are a mix of required and optional, you need a score for the required ones, and a strong score will help at most of the optional ones too.
If all of your schools are test-optional, you should still consider taking a test, because a strong score will likely help your application at selective schools whose policies say otherwise. The cost of taking the test and not submitting the score is much smaller than the cost of not having a score and wishing you did. The best source of information on this is your college counselor - talk to them!
If all of your schools are test-blind, you may genuinely be able to skip the test. But this is a small group of applicants, and even within that group, course placement and minimum eligibility benefits sometimes make taking the test worthwhile.
Admissions offices want more data when they're making a decision, not less. That's true even when their published policy suggests otherwise. The schools that have come back to required testing have effectively said as much out loud. The schools that haven't yet are mostly saying the same thing more quietly, through their admissions outcomes.
If you're trying to decide whether to test, when to test, or what a realistic score goal looks like for your college list, get in touch with us or call (214) 295-8265.
