ITHACA, N.Y. — Joining several other Ivy League schools, Cornell University announced Monday it will reinstate standardized testing requirements for undergraduate applicants, starting in 2026.
A report compiled by a task force directed to assess the impact of the school’s 2020 decision to pause its SAT/ACT exam scores requirement was published along with the announcement, outlining the school’s justification for reinstating the requirement.
The task force’s report, which can be read in full at the bottom of this article, states that they found no clear indication that the elimination of the testing requirements has increased diversity at Cornell, that submitting test scores to the test-optional programs “has a substantial and statistically significant impact” on admission chances, and that admitted students who supplied their test scores had “better academic outcomes” than students who did not submit their scores.
“Though standardized test scores are imperfect measures of a student’s aptitude and potential, the data suggests that when taken in context, these scores provide valuable insights into a student’s potential for academic success while at Cornell,” the story reads.
Proponents of removing testing requirements have argued the practice reinforces barriers against a more diverse field of students in higher education, but the task force disagreed based on the outcomes since the requirement was removed in 2020.
The task force collected data on the percentage of first-year students at Cornell who are Black, Hispanic or Indigenous. The report states that the percentage of those students rose from 23 percent to 27 percent in the five years before the pandemic (and before the testing requirement was removed), and rose again to 28 percent in Fall 2021, before falling back to 25 percent in Fall 2023.
“If the policy shift away from testing has substantially enhanced access to Cornell, it has done so in ways that elude simple measurements,” according to the task force’s report.
The task force consisted of eight people, including six department deans or provosts and two professors.
The change will not impact students applying for the fall 2025 semester but will take effect after that cycle. The school’s announcement said students are “encouraged to submit SAT and/or ACT scores to the Cornell colleges and schools that are currently test-optional.”
While admissions in the four Cornell schools that weren’t accepting testing scores were not affected by test score submissions, since they were not being accepted or considered, the task force stated that students who submitted their scores to test-optional colleges at Cornell were more likely to be admitted.
“The differential impact under the two policy scenarios suggests that admissions officers are using the test scores to inform decisions when they are available,” the report states. “Given this finding, it seems prudent for those applying under the test-optional policy to send in their test scores.”
Over the last two months, Ivy League schools have begun to reintroduce standardized testing requirements after removing them during the COVID-19 pandemic, when testing locations were difficult to navigate considering the public health measures put into place. Dartmouth University, Yale University and Brown University all preceded Cornell’s announcement with reinstatements of their own.
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