At MIT Admissions, our mission is to recruit, select, and enroll a diverse and talented group of students who are a good match for MIT’s unique education and culture. Everything we do in our process is grounded by our goal to find and admit students who will succeed at MIT and serve the world afterward.
After careful consideration, we have decided to reinstate our SAT/ACT requirement for future admissions cycles. Our research shows standardized tests help us better assess the academic preparedness of all applicants, and also help us identify socioeconomically disadvantaged students who lack access to advanced coursework or other enrichment opportunities that would otherwise demonstrate their readiness for MIT. We believe a requirement is more equitable and transparent than a test-optional policy. In the post below — and in a separate conversation with MIT News today — I
explain more01
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about how we think this decision helps us advance our mission.
When we initially suspended our testing requirement due to the disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, I wrote:
This was not a decision we made lightly. Our reliance on these tests is outcome-driven and applicant-oriented: we don’t value scores for their own sake, but only to the extent that they help us make better decisions for our students, which they do. We regularly research the outcomes of MIT students and our own admissions criteria to ensure we make good decisions for the right reasons, and we consistently find that considering performance on the SAT/ACT, particularly the math section, substantially improves the predictive validity of our decisions with respect to subsequent student success at the Institute.
Within our office, we have a dedicated research and analysis team that continuously studies our processes, outcomes, and criteria to make sure we remain mission-driven and student-centered. During the pandemic, we redoubled our efforts to understand how we can best evaluate academic readiness for all students, particularly those most impacted by its attendant disruptions. To briefly summarize a great deal of careful research:
- our ability to
accurately predict student academic success at MIT02
Our research shows this predictive validity holds even when you control for socioeconomic factors that correlate with testing. It also shows that good grades in high school do not themselves necessarily translate to academic success at MIT if you cannot account for testing. Of course, we can never be fully certain how any given applicant will do: we’re predicting the development of people, not the movement of planets, and people always surprise you. However, our research does help us establish bands of confidence that hold true in the aggregate, while allowing us, as admissions officers, to exercise individual contextual discretion in each case. The word ‘significantly’ in this bullet point is accurate both statistically and idiomatically.
is significantly improved by considering standardized testing — especially in mathematics — alongside other factors - some standardized exams besides the SAT/ACT can help us evaluate readiness, but access to these other exams is generally
more socioeconomically restricted03
Examples of these other exams include the AP/IB exams, international curricula like the IGCSEs, or the mathematical olympiads. However, access to these examinations generally depend on what is offered at your high school, and there are immense disparities between schools in this regard, and even within schools for certain students.
relative to the SAT/ACT - as a result, not having SATs/ACT scores to consider tends to
raise socioeconomic barriers to demonstrating readiness for our education,04
Although our analysis is specific to MIT, our findings directionally align with a major study conducted by the University of California’s Standardized Testing Task Force, which found that including SAT/ACT scores predicted undergraduate performance better than grades alone, and also helped admissions officers identify well-prepared students from less-advantaged backgrounds. It is also consistent with independent research compiled by education researcher Susan Dynarski that shows standardized testing can be an effective way to identify talented disadvantaged students who would otherwise go unrecognized. Of course, there may be institutions for whom this research does not hold true, but the findings are very robust for MIT, and have been for many, many years.
relative to having them, given these other inequalities
Our research can’t explain why these tests are so predictive of academic preparedness for MIT, but we believe it is likely related to the centrality of mathematics — and mathematics examinations — in our education. All MIT students, regardless of intended major, must pass two semesters of calculus, plus two semesters of calculus-based physics,
as part of our General Institute Requirements.05
The GIRs are both a defining strength of the MIT education, and also the functional constraint on access to it. Because all MIT undergraduates, no matter their major, must pass challenging classes in calculus, physics, biology, and chemistry — as well as a rigorous humanistic and communication requirement — we believe we can only responsibly admit students who are prepared to do all of that work, across all of those fields, at their time of entry to MIT. It is perhaps worth noting that the GIRs are also the most basic point of entry in each of these fields: MIT does not offer any remedial math classes ‘below’ the level of single-variable calculus, for example, or physics courses ‘below’ classical mechanics, so students have to be ready to perform at that level and pace when they arrive.
The substance and pace of these courses are both very demanding, and they culminate in
long, challenging final exams that students must pass06
In addition to final exams in the GIRs, first-year students also usually take several other exams. Most students also must take a separate math diagnostic test for physics placement as soon as they arrive on campus, and placement out of MIT classes is mostly granted through our Advanced Standing Exams, rather than by AP or transfer credit. As a member of our faculty once observed to me, “the first year at MIT is often a series of high-stakes math tests.” Given this, it is perhaps not surprising that the SAT/ACT are predictive (indeed, it would be more surprising if they weren’t).
to
proceed with their education.07
The vast majority of MIT students will then go on to take many additional quantitative and analytical courses within their program of study, even if they are not majoring in science or engineering. For example, an economics degree at MIT requires at least one course in econometrics, and a philosophy degree at MIT usually entails courses in set theory, modal logic, and/or infinities and paradox). To a degree unlike almost any other institution, MIT is a place where every student will have to do a lot of math (and math tests).
In other words, there is no path through MIT that does not rest on a rigorous foundation in mathematics, and we need to be sure our students are ready for that
as soon as they arrive.08
A reader might reasonably ask: well, can’t MIT do more to bring students up to speed? Why are you most focused on students who you think can already do well, and not those who could, if they had more help? To be clear, everyone will find MIT a challenge, no matter how well-prepared. And MIT does provide support for its students through its excellent tutoring programs, affinity networks, support services, alternative curricula, summer programs, and so on. However, our research shows there is a degree of preparation below which a student, even with those resources, is unlikely to be able to succeed. We feel it is our responsibility to make those difficult calls, and only admit a student to MIT if they are ready to undertake its education at this point in their educational development. Meanwhile, we continue to collaborate with our partners in K-12 education to try and help interrupt persistent, intergenerational inequality where and how we can.
To be clear, performance on standardized tests is not the central focus of our holistic admissions process. We do not prefer people with perfect scores; indeed, despite what some people infer from our statistics, we do not consider an applicant’s scores at all beyond the point where preparedness has been established as part of a multifactor analysis. Nor are strong scores themselves sufficient: our research shows students also need to do well in high school and have a strong match for MIT, including the resilience to rebound from its challenges, and the initiative to make use of its resources. That’s why we don’t select students solely on how well they score on the tests, but only consider scores to the extent they
help us feel more confident about an applicant’s preparedness09
It is worth noting that since MIT opened in 1865, and until our public-health driven suspension in 2020, MIT has required some kind of entranc
