I’m not sure what the first sentence has to do with the second sentence here, and I’d generally caution us amateurs from stating hypothesis (AOs meaningfully differ between 1530 and 1570) as fact, since nobody commenting on this issue actually knows.
A different hypothesis, though, and I’ll pledge to check myself on it 3-6 months from now. I think that as Emory is saying the quiet part out loud (post-Covid grade inflation + TO policies has made it unreasonably difficult to predict and differentiate who’s appropriate and who isn’t for a highly selective school), and as there is no appropriate replacement for testing (APs, as you can infer from the thread above, are an awful replacement - for reasons of equity, precision, and quantity, at least), many of the schools that have not yet announced that they will be TO for 2025 are going to end up requiring testing.
I don’t have the quantitative data to back this up, but just from being an active observer, I believe that two things are true:
- we’ve seen essentially zero movement on new announcements of TO policies for 2025 in the last 4-6 months - if you didn’t announce before the early summer, you haven’t announced since;
- last year, we saw some schools confirm their TO policies during the fall (when Juniors are really starting to test), though some were later
I think we will see several T20+ schools (and maybe more than several) that are TO for 2024 go test-required for 2025 - there just needs to be a couple who say it for the others to follow. Ones to watch include Cornell (who announced their TO policy for 2024 in September 2022), UPenn (who announced in Jan 2023), Stanford (who I think announced October 2022), Dartmouth (maybe March 2023), Duke (unsure), Emory.
We will see!