After pandemic pause, Caltech restores standardized testing requirement for incoming undergrads

Caltech on Thursday, April 11, restored its standardized testing requirement for entering students, only four years after disbanding it, joining Harvard on the same day in bringing back the policy.

Officials say the requirement — effective immediately — “reflects the judgment that standardized testing provides admissions officers and faculty reviewers useful information about academic preparedness as part of a holistic consideration of all prospective students,” according to a statement from the Pasadena-based science and engineering institute.

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The announcement came just hours after Harvard reinstated testing as a requirement to attend its campus.

The requirement is effective immediately, meaning all students who apply to the beginning in fall 2024 and would enroll in fall 2025 would have to attach standardized test scores as part of their application.

The decision stems from the institute’s Advisory Committee on Undergraduate Admissions Policy, which found that despite a recent moratorium on testing, an increasing number of applying students were still completing the standardized tests.

Caltech said more than 95% of its most recently enrolled class had taken the exams. Such tests include ACT — American College Testing exam — or SAT. Another example includes Advanced Placement exams.

During the moratorium, test scores were not visible to admissions officials until after they were admissions were made. But the committee said knowing the test scores is a vital “data point” in understanding a student’s “unique circumstances and experiences.”

“We think it is critical that our admissions office and the faculty who are reviewing applicants have available to them all the information that could shape their understanding of a prospective student’s readiness for our rigorous academic programs,” the committee noted.

An announcement of restoring the requirement had always been a possibility.

In 2020, the hub announced a two-year moratorium, and in 2022, that was extended to five years.

The 2020 moratorium was a response to the pandemic, noting its impact on prospective students across the globe wanting to attend Caltech. Similar action was taken by hundreds of higher education hubs at the time.

By 2022, the institute wanted to continue assessing the value of a moratorium on admissions. The extended moratorium followed a faculty study that found “standardized test scores have little to no power in predicting students’ performance in the first-term mathematics and physics classes that first-year students must take as part of Caltech’s core curriculum.”

It also found that the predictive power of such test scores wanes as students moved through their first-year of core courses, according to a Caltech news release at the time.

The goal was to maintain Caltech’s standing as a destination of choice “for the brightest and most creative STEM students from all backgrounds, experiences, and viewpoints, the Institute is announcing several updates to its admissions practices,” officials said in 2022, when it extended the moratorium.

Caltech was not alone on Thursday.

Harvard University announced that it, too, was restoring standardized tests as a requirement for admission beginning with the class of 2029.

Harvard had initially said it was going to maintain its test-optional policy through the entering class of the fall of 2026.