This article is featured in the 2025 Winter Carnival Special Issue.
On Dec. 13, 2024, the College offered admission to the earliest accepted members of the Class of 2029 — the first class to apply to Dartmouth since its reinstatement of a standardized testing requirement, following a four-year pause due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Now, those incoming members of the Class of 2029 have joined the robust community dialogue surrounding standardized testing. With new voices weighing in — and another cohort set to join the conversation in late March or early April, when the College releases regular decision admissions — The Dartmouth set off to dig deeper into standardized testing at Dartmouth. We look into its history, consider its present and, most importantly, probe the opinions of those most recently affected — the Class of 2029.
Origins of Standardized Testing
According to archives in the Rauner Special Collections Library, admissions tests have played a role in Dartmouth’s admissions process since the late 18th century. Initially, the College held its own admissions examinations — the only entry requirement — on “the day before Commencement” as well as at the end of summer break, according to the 1819 edition of “Laws of Dartmouth College.” The exams tested “Grammar of the Latin and Greek languages” and “Arithmetick to the Square Root,” the edition explained. The College also required candidates to be “versed in Virgil, Cicero’s Select Oration, the Greek testament [and] be able accurately to translate English into Latin; and also to understand the fundamental rules of Arithmetic,” the 1796 edition of “Laws of Dartmouth College” stated.
In 1876, those requirements evolved — admissions “changed its requirements from the school algebra to university algebra as far as quadratics, and added solid to plane geometry,” according to the book “History of Dartmouth College 1815-1909.” The same year, College President Asa Dodge Smith introduced an even more radical change to the faculty: a “new plan of admission” in which candidates would no longer undergo examination by the College, but instead be evaluated based on “a certificate from a fitting school” attesting “that they have completed the curriculum of the senior year, and have regularly graduated.”
The examination change was soon followed by another evolution in requirements. In 1880, the College revised its emphasis for admission, favoring “English history, and a composition in English for English grammar” instead of Greek and Roman history — the previous focus, according to “History of Dartmouth College 1815-1909.”
Turn of the Century
The admissions process experienced a wholesale overhaul in 1902, when the College adopted a “‘group’ system,” according to “History of Dartmouth College 1815-1909.” Admissions requirements were now “divided into groups” — from which candidates would choose different “subjects for admission” to present, depending on their intended field of study.
Also in the early 20th century, the College began utilizing exams that would become precursors to the modern-day SAT. An article published in the Nov. 7, 1921 edition of The Dartmouth wrote that “After studying the results of the previous examinations the Department of Psychology decided that the Army Alpha tests were too easy for college men and incorporated a few of the good points in the Alpha exams in a new freshman intelligence test.” The “Army Alpha Test,” “an intelligence test given to millions of recruits during World War I,” was eventually adapted for college admission by Carl Brigham and renamed the Scholastic Aptitude Test, according to PBS.
Introduction of the SAT
The SAT faced criticism, even before the College incorporated it into its admissions process. After Brigham founded the SAT in 1926, an article published in The Dartmouth from that year argued that “the tests very definitely emphasize phases of academic intelligence, and somewhat ignore mechanical and social intelligence.”
Despite concerns about the efficacy of the test, Dartmouth announced in 1952 that incoming applicants, starting with the Class of 1956, would be required to submit SAT scores with their applications. Even so, the new requirement did not “fundamentally” change the admissions process and was “only to be used as an additional determining factor in the small amount of marginal cases,” according to an article published in The Dartmouth on Jan. 12, 1952. Seven years later, Everett Franklin introduced the ACT — a standardized test that remains an option for prospective students today.
The role of standardized testing expanded further in 1982, when the College’s English department decided to grant exemptions from English 5 — a freshman writing class — based on students’ scores in the verbal subsection of the SAT, according to an article published in the Sept. 20, 1982 issue of The Dartmouth. The College also began to exempt students who scored a four on the Advanced Placement English exam, where it had previously required a score of five, according to the article.
The decision, for some students, was an unpopular one, according to an op-ed published in the same issue of The Dartmouth. A student named Karen Moore wrote that “Through conversations with students, faculty, and administrators, I have learned that many of them consider this policy a mistake which will create serious, long-term problems for students.”
Modern-Day Testing
After decades of testing requirements, the College chose to suspend its standardized testing requirement in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Dartmouth kept the policy in place for almost four years, before reinstating the testing requirement in February 2024.
College President Sian Leah Beilock announced the decision to reinstate the requirement after reviewing a faculty-led study on testing requirements. The report found that standardized test scores correlate with student success “in Dartmouth curriculum,” according to past reporting by The Dartmouth.
Some Dartmouth faculty agreed with this perspective. James Schmidt GR, who taught MATH 1, “Introduction to Calculus,” last fall, said standardized test scores are an important data point in admissions, having personally observed “systematic and fundamental issues” with many students’ math abilities, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Especially post-COVID,” Schmidt said there needs to be “some verification or validation method” that students will be able to understand classroom material.
“For Math 1, if you are struggling with, say, the idea of converting a percentage to a fraction, you are going to have a very difficult time,” he said. “And there were indeed students who had similar deficits who had a very hard time.”
Several students have commented on the requirement in The Dartmouth — while some support standardized testing, others have argued that the SAT systematically disadvantages individuals with disabilities and BIPOC students and is a flawed measurement of future academic success.
Beyond campus, alumni also weighed in. In an April 2024 op-ed, Dartmouth Latino Alumni Association president Kially Ruiz ’98 wrote that “[t]he SAT is a fundamentally flawed psychometric tool for determining academic achievement, intelligence or scholastic potential.” Ruiz further criticized the test for “imposing one narrow definition of success, a kind of zero-sum game, which requires some students to fail in order for others to succeed,” as well as lacking the ability to “promote or encourage creativity, innovation, inventiveness, talent or wit” and “measure the full range of human capacity.”
Meanwhile, Nathan Bruschi ’10 — who has served as an alumni admissions interviewer for the past 15 years — said he supported the reinstatement, citing the fact that “the College has empirical data backing up their belief” in the value of standardized testing.
“In the absence of such a predictor on a student’s application, the admissions department will have to put greater weight on grades and class rank and awards, which create their own stresses and their own overemphasis on those elements,” Bruschi said.
Still, Bruschi emphasized that Dartmouth’s admissions process is holistic. He explained that he “intentionally” does not ask applicants for their grades and test scores before his alumni interviews.
“My thought is that information is baked already into the application, and any bias that I get from that would lead to that part being double counted,” Bruschi said.
The Class of 2029 Weighs In
For some members of the Class of 2029, the reinstatement did not affect their admissions plans. Yvette Chen ’29, an admitted student from Beijing, said she had not considered applying test-optional even before the College’s announcement, due to her high school’s “very competitive” environment — an environment that she noted can cause significant psychological pressure.
“[There was] a kind of signal or message that if you don’t get a 1500 on the SAT, you will be declined by most of the universities,” she said. “It is quite hard to gain the courage to not give your score when all of the people around you are giving their scores, which are unimaginably high.”
Domestically, that sentiment appears to be true as well. Noah Herrera ’29, an admitted student from Lubbock, Texas, said he was “a little scared” when he heard that Dartmouth reinstated the requirement because of how his score compared to those of previously admitted students.
“I’ll be honest, my SAT score wasn’t in [Dartmouth’s] 50th percentile,” Herrera said. “I think I was barely at the 25th percentile.”
Some students also suggested the College increase transparency regarding the role of testing in the admissions process. The College evaluates standardized test scores within an applicant’s high school demographics and environment, according to past reporting by The Dartmouth. On one Dartmouth Admissions FAQ webpage, the College writes that test scores are used for “contextualizing” applicants in the “environmental factors that produced that person.”
For some, though, that information is not easy to locate online. Herrera suggested that the College boost its online transparency related to test scores, in order to help students feel more comfortable with their performances.
An attendee of one of Dartmouth’s fly-in programs — where prospective high school applicants spend time on campus and room with current students — Herrera added that he gained more insight about the College’s reinstated testing requirement while in Hanover than from any online resources.
“When I was going over their website and looking at other websites about Dartmouth’s standardized testing, there was nowhere that really explained in depth the way I got it explained to me about how you’re not compared to other students,” he said.
Ultimately, standardized testing has been a hot button issue on campus since the SAT’s inception — and it looks poised to remain one in the years to come.
