It’s towards the bottom of the main admissions page here:
Testing policy for Fall 2025 applicants
For the 2022–23, 2023–24, and 2024–25 admission cycles, Stanford will not require ACT or SAT scores for first-year or transfer applicants.
Our test optional policy will extend to applicants applying for the Fall 2025 entry term.
Stanford is committed to a holistic review of all candidates. We consider the vast array of information provided in and with each student’s application, whether that information includes test scores or not. Students may continue to self-report test scores in their application if they would like. Applications without test scores will not be at a disadvantage.
The NCAA Eligibility Center has announced a standardized testing policy for students who intend to play NCAA Division I or II sports: “the NCAA will no longer require standardized testing as part of the eligibility criteria.”
I know more than a few kids rejected from Ivy with 1500+/34+ scores.
But there are at least one kid per year from my kids HS got into Stanford for the last 2 years and they didn’t submit their scores.
I do hear a lot of the test score stories from people who are paying $250/hr to their tutors as reasons why they spend the big bucks.
Yeah the previous two years have been truly test optional for lots of schools. Some schools are still test optional. Some schools (like Yale) love the tests, others dislike them for various reasons.
A friend in California told me that the UC schools dislike the tests because scores so strongly correlate with race, Stanford might be similar. It is interesting that Stanford makes the very strong statement:
Applications without test scores will not be at a disadvantage
UC’s don’t “dislike” the tests; they’re legally mandated to be test blind. That’s a result of legislation, not an opinion (and I know more than one UC faculty member who bemoans this reality).
The UC board of Regents voted to go test blind. They are not legally mandated to do so and were actually going to develop there own test; a plan which they subsequently dropped.
Sorry my mistake regarding the nature of the decision. But my understanding is that there was incredible outside (i.e. political) pressure to do this. Which is also the reason that “their own test” never happened.
I am sure that you are spot on regarding the political pressure behind this. Admissions to the top UCs feel even more opaque than Ivy admissions at this point in time.
Not Yale. The equivalent statement on their site is:
Yale’s internal research has consistently shown that standardized test scores are a significant predictor of a student’s undergraduate academic performance. When students include scores with their applications, the Yale Admissions Committee evaluates them within each student’s unique context and uses them to augment other academic indicators throughout the application.
For applicants without scores, the Admissions Committee places greater weight on other parts of the application, such as high school transcripts, recommendation letters, and essays.
This vague language could be interpreted lots of ways, including “Applications without test scores will not be at a disadvantage”, but the dean makes it clear in the interview that that’s definitely not true for everyone.
Yes! My son fought me on submitting his 32 but the average at his high school is a 19! Without even knowing any of this, I thought he needed to submit to “legitimize” his stellar grades. My thought was if he didn’t submit, they’d definitely assume he didn’t scratch the 30s. He ended up submitting but we definitely didn’t see eye to eye on it for a while.
