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Comment by slg | Hacker News Reader

I'm picking on you specifically because a lot of people are making this mistake. "Not requiring" is not the same as "eliminating". Not submitting scores will no longer be a reason someone is rejected. Someone who did well on them can still submit them and it will help their application.

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I don't see how this can work in practice. At some point, you'll have an application with an SAT go up against an application without one for the same seat. Either a really good SAT score will push that one up (meaning not submitting an SAT score hurts application #2) or the score is ignored, meaning it doesn't actually help to include it.

Exaggerating here for ease of description: it used to be that if you had 2 spots and these 3 applicants

- applicant A: average grades, average SAT, no sports

- applicant B: great grades, no SAT, great sports

- applicant C: great grades, great SAT, great sports

then B wasn't even considered. Now, B will probably get in over A.

>I don't see how this can work in practice.

That's because the admissions process is not the line-by-line ranking exercise you're implying.

In some cases an SAT may help to complete the picture of an applicant. In other cases, other attribute permutations are enough. Maybe #1 was close and the SAT sealed it. But, it's not necessarily the case that applicant #2 was hurt by not submitting their SAT (or would have fared any better by submitting even a perfect SAT score).

I haven't followed this closely, but have seen a few headlines and tweets in passing. This is the first I've heard that people can optionally add test scores to help them stand out. Thanks for highlighting this.

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