Many colleges suspended the requirement simultaneously in 2020, citing the pandemic, and you're claiming that it's revisionist? Occam's razor suggests the cited justification was the reason, and with the pandemic over, this explains why many colleges are now going back to requiring test scores.
Given the thousands of op-eds and the barrels of ink spilled over the situation at the time, the organization surely knew the context of the decision they were making, especially given they extended the policy several times.
Indeed, it would be foolish not to read the context, and the context in 2020 was a global pandemic.
Serious question: are you denying that the pandemic disrupted the administration of standardized tests? It certainly disrupted education in general, at every level.
You're already tacitly granting the fact that the testing requirement was suspended in 2020 because of the pandemic.
https://www.nytimes.com/article/sat-act-test-optional-colleg... https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/21/us/university-california-...
One focuses on the pandemic related reasons, one focuses on equality concerns.
https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/press-room/university...
In this case there was a coincidence, because California had started reconsidering the test requirement back in 2018, and the process happened to reach culmination in 2020... but not until after the pandemic started.
The decision was also very much about guaranteeing spots for California residents in California schools.
No, I'm not. Yale (along with a number of college colleges) suspended the testing policy in 2020 due to the pandemic. That's an indisputable historical fact.
"For nearly four years Yale’s undergraduate admissions process has been test-optional. The experience, originally necessitated by the pandemic, has been an invaluable opportunity to think deeply about testing policy and to generate new data and analyses. With testing availability now fully restored for prospective applicants around the world, we have reevaluated our policy with the benefit of fresh insights." https://admissions.yale.edu/test-flexible
Let me put it this way: before the pandemic there was already a work-from-home movement. But when countless companies suddenly decided to do WFH in 2020, it wasn't because of the movement! It was because of the pandemic. And a lot of those companies are now calling for return-to-office.
It's the exact same thing with standardized testing. There's literally no difference between the two cases. We don't need a political conspiracy theory when there's a very obvious and logical explanation for what happened. The pandemic was a forced experiment for WFH and a forced experiment for many other things, such as the omission of standardized testing. We had students taking classes from home too!
You are kind of ignoring everything Yale themselves said after the words "originally necessitated by the pandemic".
Nothing in their long, thoughtful writeup says "it was only done for convenience, sorry". If anything, it's a carefully worded and researched examination of them earnestly pursuing the policy on academic grounds and examining why the policy failed.
1) It wasn't a crazy idea. As ejb999 noted, a number of colleges had already done it before the pandemic.
2) It wasn't crazy to suspend the testing requirement during the pandemic.
3) It wasn't crazy to continue an experiment that had already been in progress in order to get conclusive results.
4) Yale didn't say the policy was a disaster. They simply decided that the other policy is better for them, in light of the empirical results.
5) There was no official end date of the pandemic. Thus, different institutions will move at a different pace. And Yale also mentioned as a factor for them, "With testing availability now fully restored for prospective applicants around the world".