After a five-year break from requiring applicants to submit standardized test scores for undergraduate admission, the University is reverting to the pre-pandemic norm. Beginning with the 2025–26 admissions cycle, students must submit SAT or ACT scores.
Penn pivoted to a test-optional policy in 2020–21 to accommodate applicants whose access to testing had been curtailed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, the admissions office has reassessed the policy on an annual basis. In a blog post explaining the change for next year, Penn Admissions portrayed the decision as a way to make the application process clearer and kinder to applicants.
“The flexibility of a test-optional policy has escalated decision-making stress in an application process that is already stressful,” the post stated. “Requiring submission of SAT or ACT results removes the ‘submission choice’ stress and allows students to focus their energy on preparing the components of the application that are personal and provide breadth and depth for our review.”
Penn’s test-optional policy coincided with a dramatic rise in undergraduate applications, from 42,205 in 2020 to more than 72,000 this year. The question of whether to submit scores has grown increasingly fraught for applicants amid the inflation of reported median scores. Last year Peter Struck, the Stephen A. Levin Family Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, told the Gazette that the median SAT score of incoming College students who’d chosen to submit it was a perfect 1600—but that only 41 percent of matriculants had reported their scores.
The admissions office has consistently portrayed standardized test scores as just one data point—and not necessarily the most important one—it evaluates. In a 2024 interview with the Gazette [“Admissions in Transition,” Mar|Apr 2024], Vice Provost and Dean of Admissions Whitney Soule emphasized the primacy of high school performance and writing skills in Penn’s application-review process. “The primary assessment,” she said, “is dependent on the curriculum that’s available at a student’s high school, what the students chose to take, how well they were doing with those courses, and the ideas that they’ve conveyed in their writing and how their teachers describe them, and so forth. Testing was present [before 2020], but it was separate. So when Penn had to pivot to test-optional during COVID, that primary fundamental approach to academic assessment didn’t have to adjust.”
Penn Admissions conveyed a similar message in its announcement of the restoration of mandatory SAT/ACT submission. “Penn’s practice has been, and continues to be, considering a student’s school-based academic record on its own merit, with testing as part of Admission’s broad and comprehensive assessment,” the office said in a February statement. “With this approach, testing complements a student’s existing accomplishments and can offer additional relevant information in our comprehensive and holistic admission process.”—TP
