We had a presentation by our school college counselor last night, and one of the takeaways from the class of 2025 common app was that the % of students submitting scores went up (I think it was by high single digits but don’t recall exact increase), so that the % of kids submitting a test score is now back above 50%.
Other takeaways related to some of the discussion above were that most of the increase was from wealthier areas so given that students are judged against their school, this is something to factor in when deciding to go test optional or not ; that they are hearing more from colleges, especially the more selective ones, that test optional hasn’t always had good outcomes against a background of grade inflation with some students struggling to keep up, and they expect more schools will go back to test requirements as a result; and that they do expect average test scores reported on CDS etc to go down as the self-selection of only reporting higher scores gets undermined.