On the last Monday of March 2022, two weeks after MIT finished notifying 1,337 applicants that they had been accepted (and rejected some 32,000 others), a post appeared on the website of the university’s admissions office. After two pandemic-disrupted application cycles, during which basically every college in America ditched its SAT and ACT requirements, the dean of admissions, Stu Schmill, announced that MIT would be asking for test scores again, starting with the high-school seniors applying this fall.
MIT had determined that it needed tests to make sure its students could do the work — a conclusion reached after “careful research,” Schmill wrote. The 1,400-word post was accompanied by nearly 3,000 words of endnotes, citing everything from academic journals to MIT’s own graduation data.
