My Child is College-Bound. Should They take the SAT/ACT/IB/AP exams?
College preparation choices can feel like you’ve been petrified in a pose of indecision.
There’s been a lot of hand-wringing in the last five or ten years about the use of standardized assessments for college admissions. The test-optional movement led to the end of testing requirements for a great many schools, particularly in the years during and just after the Covid pandemic. However, some colleges, after living with the reality of having less information about their incoming classes, have reversed those decisions.
What does this larger conversation have to do with planning whether or not your child should take a standardized test before applying to colleges? Actually, surprisingly little. Because college policies for admissions vary so widely, the cost/benefit analysis when planning for testing should include your child’s individual goals and the colleges to which they intend to apply. (If you decide to sign your child up for pre-college exams and want to maximize their success in college, contact me to set up a consultation!).
Here are the three situations in which I would recommend students take major standardized tests:
1. Your preferred colleges require or accept them.
Below you can see that 3/5 top private and 1/5 top public colleges of 2025 (Forbes) require the ACT or SAT for admissions. If your child intends to apply to Stanford, MIT, Yale, or the University of Florida, these exams should be part of your college strategy. But what about the schools for which the ACT and SAT are optional? Test scores are part of the overall portfolio of a student, and having another data point could provide more context to college admissions decisions. You can also search this comprehensive list of the 121 colleges that required the ACT or SAT for the last admissions cycle and then double check to see if they will continue to require them in the coming year. And if you don’t yet know what schools are on your child’s list? Hedge your bets and sign up for the tests. Better to get it scheduled now than to scramble to prepare for an exam with limited time.
2. You want to leverage your child’s pre-college work to jump-start their college education.
If your child hopes to attend one of the schools in the University of California system, you may look at the chart above and determine that it’s not worth the time, effort, and expense for them to take standardized tests. But there can still be a lot of value in them doing so because of opportunities to test out of introductory courses. As it turns out, UC schools accept high scores on sections of the ACT, SAT, International Baccalaureate (IB) and Advanced Placement (AP) exams in place of the introductory writing course. MIT has a similar policy. Because all students in most colleges must take a first-year writing course, regardless of major, testing out of this class could be a time and money savings for you and your child. Other academic areas may also have this policy; check out your child’s preferred colleges to see what opportunities they have to test out of introductory courses.
3. You want more information on how prepared your child is for college.
Standardized tests are designed to provide insight for students, parents, teachers, and admissions officers on students’ areas of strength and potential weakness in academics. There are curriculum, standards, and rigor differences across states and school districts, but standardized tests measure the same skills for all students. For various reasons, your child may be missing some key knowledge and skill areas they will need in order to succeed in college, even if their high school grades are strong. Taking one or more of these exams in their sophomore or early junior year can pinpoint areas of needed growth so you can address them well before their college matriculation. A study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research in March of this year found that “standardized test scores predict academic outcomes with a normalized slope four times greater than that from high school GPA.”
As you can see, my recommendations cover the majority of students applying to colleges. Whether you know they will be required or not, the power of these tests to prepare students for college is significant. Want some help getting ready? Reach out.