As high school juniors get ready to apply for university, many worry colleges will ask them to submit scores for standardized tests they can’t currently take because of the coronavirus.
This April, opportunities to take the SAT and ACT were canceled with tentative postponements until June. While some students take these tests only once, it’s common to take them multiple times to try for the best possible score. More than one million high school juniors were scheduled to take the SAT or ACT for the first time this spring, according to the College Board.
Fearing their applications will be put at a disadvantage, students are asking colleges not to require test scores in fall 2021.
“A majority of colleges require SAT and ACT scores,” said Maodon Tohouri, a junior at Amador Valley High School in Pleasantville, California. “For those who wanted to take or retake the test [this spring], that opportunity has been lost … These announcements have heightened the anxiety of many of my peers. And for those who have always been disenfranchised in this process, the announcements are worse.”
Tohouri addressed a virtual crowd at a live online panel discussion on Monday, hosted by Student Voice, a student-run non-profit. The group has been calling on colleges and universities to make standardized test scores optional for next year’s high school graduates in light of the current situation and to question the role of standardized testing in admissions more broadly. Three weeks ago, the group started a petition, collecting over 1,000 signatures in favor of temporarily nixing test score requirements, and held a letter-writing campaign to colleges and universities.
At the online press conference, Chris Suggs – a third-year student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the president of his campus’s Black Student Movement – argued that standardized testing is inequitable under the best of circumstances, let alone during the coronavirus. He worked part-time in high school to help support his household, while juggling extracurriculars and volunteer work, which was “extremely taxing and tolling,” he said, but standardized test scores don’t take those kinds of challenges into account.
Now high school students are applying to college at a time when communities of color have been disproportionately hit by coronavirus cases and the SAT and ACT are unpredictably delayed.
