Dropping Standardized Testing for Admissions Trades Off Information and Access

Published Online:https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.02573

References

  • Abdulkadiroğlu A (2005) College admissions with affirmative action. Internat. J. Game Theory 33(4):535–549.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
  • Allman M, Ashlagi I, Lo I, Love J, Mentzer K, Ruiz-Setz L, O’Connell H (2022) Designing school choice for diversity in the San Francisco unified school district. Proc. 23rd ACM Conf. Econom. Comput. (ACM, New York), 290–291.Google Scholar
  • Alvero A, Giebel S, Gebre-Medhin B, Antonio AL, Stevens ML, Domingue BW (2021) Essay content and style are strongly related to household income and SAT scores: Evidence from 60,000 undergraduate applications. Sci. Adv. 7(42):eabi9031.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
  • Anderson N (2020) Colleges are ditching required admission tests over COVID-19. Will They Ever Go Back? The Washington Post (June 15), www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/coronavirus-sat-act-admission/2020/06/15/18c406dc-acca-11ea-a9d9-a81c1a491c52_story.html.Google Scholar
  • Arcidiacono P, Aucejo EM, Fang H, Spenner KI (2011) Does affirmative action lead to mismatch? A new test and evidence. Quant. Econom. 2(3):303–333.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
  • Arrow K (1971) The theory of discrimination. Technical report, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ.Google Scholar
  • Avery C, Hoxby C, Jackson C, Burek K, Pope G, Raman M (2006) Cost should be no barrier: An evaluation of the first year of Harvard’s financial aid initiative. NBER Working Paper No 12029, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA.Google Scholar
  • Aycock K (2021) Record increase in historically underrepresented graduate applicants. Accessed May 19, 2026, https://grad.berkeley.edu/news/announcements/record-high-increase-in-historically-underrepresented-graduate-applicants/.Google Scholar
  • Backes B (2012) Do affirmative action bans lower minority college enrollment and attainment?: Evidence from statewide bans. J. Human Resources 47(2):435–455.Google Scholar
  • Baek J, Farias V (2021) Fair exploration via axiomatic bargaining. Adv. Neural Inform. Processing Systems 34:22034–22045.Google Scholar
  • Bagde S, Epple D, Taylor L (2016) Does affirmative action work? Caste, gender, college quality, and academic success in India. Amer. Econom. Rev. 106(6):1495–1521.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
  • Banerjee D, Smilowitz K (2019) Incorporating equity into the school bus scheduling problem. Transportation Res. Part E: Logist. Transportation Rev. 131:228–246.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
  • Becker GS (1957) The Economics of Discrimination (University of Chicago Press, Chicago).Google Scholar
  • Bellafante G (2020) Should Ivy League schools randomly select students (at least for a little while)? New York Times (December 18), www.nytimes.com/2020/12/18/nyregion/ivy-league-admissions-lottery.html.Google Scholar
  • Bertsimas D, Farias VF, Trichakis N (2011) The price of fairness. Oper. Res. 59(1):17–31.LinkGoogle Scholar
  • Blackwell D (1953) Equivalent comparisons of experiments. Ann. Math. Statist. 24(2):265–272.Google Scholar
  • Bleemer Z (2022) Affirmative action, mismatch, and economic mobility after California’s Proposition 209. Quart. J. Econom. 137(1):115–160.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
  • Bleemer Z (2023) Affirmative action and its race-neutral alternatives. J. Public Econom. 220:104839.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
  • Borghesan E (2022) The heterogeneous effects of changing SAT requirements in admissions: An equilibrium evaluation. Working paper, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA.Google Scholar
  • Borgs C, Chayes J, Haghtalab N, Kalai AT, Vitercik E (2019) Algorithmic greenlining: An approach to increase diversity. Proc. AAAI/ACM Conf. AI, Ethics, and Society (ACM, New York), 69–76.Google Scholar
  • Castera R, Loiseau P, Pradelski BSR (2025) Correlation of rankings in matching markets. Management Sci., ePub ahead of print December 4, https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2024.06067.Google Scholar
  • Chade H, Eeckhout J, Smith L (2017) Sorting through search and matching models in economics. J. Econom. Literature 55(2):493–544.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
  • Chade H, Lewis G, Smith L (2014) Student portfolios and the college admissions problem. Rev. Econom. Stud. 81(3):971–1002.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
  • Chan J, Eyster E (2003) Does banning affirmative action lower college student quality? Amer. Econom. Rev. 93(3):858–872.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
  • Chetty R, Deming DJ, Friedman JN (2026) Diversifying society’s leaders? The determinants and causal effects of admission to highly selective private colleges. Technical report. Quart. J. Econom. 141(1):51–145.Google Scholar
  • Cohen MC, Elmachtoub AN, Lei X (2022) Price discrimination with fairness constraints. Management Sci. 68(12):8536–8552.LinkGoogle Scholar
  • Corbett-Davies S, Gaebler JD, Nilforoshan H, Shroff R, Goel S (2023) The measure and mismeasure of fairness. J. Machine Learn. Res. 24(312):1–117.Google Scholar
  • Dessein W, Frankel A, Kartik N (2023) Test-optional admissions. Preprint, submitted April 15, https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.07551.Google Scholar
  • Dutt K, Pfaff DL, Bernstein AF, Dillard JS, Block CJ (2016) Gender differences in recommendation letters for postdoctoral fellowships in geoscience. Nature Geosci. 9(11):805–808.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
  • Ellison G, Pathak PA (2021) The efficiency of race-neutral alternatives to race-based affirmative action: Evidence from chicago’s exam schools. Amer. Econom. Rev. 111(3):943–975.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
  • Emelianov V, Gast N, Gummadi KP, Loiseau P (2020) On fair selection in the presence of implicit variance. Proc. 21st ACM Conf. Econom. Comput. (ACM, New York), 649–675.Google Scholar
  • Epple D, Romano R, Sieg H (2006) Admission, tuition, and financial aid policies in the market for higher education. Econometrica 74(4):885–928.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
  • Espenshade TJ, Radford AW (2013) No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite College Admission and Campus Life (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ).Google Scholar
  • Faenza Y, Gupta S, Zhang X (2020) Impact of bias on school admissions and targeted interventions. Preprint, submitted April 22, https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.10846.Google Scholar
  • Fershtman D, Pavan A (2020) Soft affirmative action and minority recruitment. Preprint, submitted April 30, https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.14953.Google Scholar
  • Fu Q (2006) A theory of affirmative action in college admissions. Econom. Inquiry 44(3):420–428.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
  • Grossman J, Tomkins S, Page L, Goel S (2024) The disparate impacts of college admissions policies on asian american applicants. Sci. Rep. 14:4449.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
  • Hernanzi V, Malherbeti F, Pellizzari M (2004) Take-up of welfare benefits in OECD countries. https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/social-issues-migration-health/take-up-of-welfare-benefits-in-oecd-countries_525815265414.Google Scholar
  • Hoxby CM, Avery C (2012) The missing “one-offs”: The hidden supply of high-achieving, low income students. NBER Working Paper No. 18586, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA.Google Scholar
  • Hu L, Immorlica N, Vaughan JW (2019) The disparate effects of strategic manipulation. Proc. ACM Conf. Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (ACM, New York), 259–268.Google Scholar
  • Hyman J (2016) ACT for all: The effect of mandatory college entrance exams on postsecondary attainment and choice. Ed. Finance Policy 12(3):281–311.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
  • Immorlica N, Ligett K, Ziani J (2019) Access to population-level signaling as a source of inequality. Proc. ACM Conf. Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, 249–258.Google Scholar
  • Kallus N, Zhou A (2021) Fairness, welfare, and equity in personalized pricing. Proc. ACM Conf. Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (ACM, New York), 296–314.Google Scholar
  • Kamada Y, Kojima F (2019) Fair matching under constraints: Theory and applications. Rev. Econom. Stud. 91(2):1162–1199.Google Scholar
  • Kannan S, Roth A, Ziani J (2019) Downstream effects of affirmative action. Proc. ACM Conf. Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (ACM, New York), 240–248.Google Scholar
  • Kapor A (2020) Distributional effects of race-blind affirmative action. Working paper, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ.Google Scholar
  • Karni G, Rothblum GN, Yona G (2021) On fairness and stability in two-sided matchings. Preprint, submitted November 21, https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.10885.Google Scholar
  • Kleinberg J, Raghavan M (2018) Selection Problems in the Presence of Implicit Bias. 9th Innovations Theoret. Comput. Sci. Conf., vol. 33 (Schloss Dagstuhl–Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik, Wadern, Germany), 1–19.Google Scholar
  • Liu Z, Garg N (2021) Test-optional policies: Overcoming strategic behavior and informational gaps. Preprint, submitted July 19, https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.08922.Google Scholar
  • Liu LT, Wilson A, Haghtalab N, Kalai AT, Borgs C, Chayes J (2020) The disparate equilibria of algorithmic decision making when individuals invest rationally. Proc. ACM Conf. Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (ACM, New York), 381–391.Google Scholar
  • Long MC (2004) Race and college admissions: An alternative to affirmative action? Rev. Econom. Statist. 86(4):1020–1033.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
  • Manshadi V, Niazadeh R, Rodilitz S (2021) Fair dynamic rationing. Proc. 22nd ACM Conf. Econom. Comput. (ACM, New York), 694–695.Google Scholar
  • Monachou FG, Ashlagi I (2019) Discrimination in online markets: Effects of social bias on learning from reviews and policy design. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, vol. 32 (Curran Associates, Inc., Red Hook, NY), 2142–2152.Google Scholar
  • Nieto del Rio GM (2021) University of California will no longer consider SAT and ACT scores. New York Times (May 15), www.nytimes.com/2021/05/15/us/SAT-scores-uc-university-of-california.html.Google Scholar
  • Niu M, Kannan S, Roth A, Vohra R (2022) Best vs. all: Equity and accuracy of standardized test score reporting. Proc. ACM Conf. Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (ACM, New York), 574–586.Google Scholar
  • Park JJ, Becks AH (2015) Who benefits from SAT prep?: An examination of high school context and race/ethnicity. Rev. Higher Ed. 39(1):1–23.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
  • Phelps ES (1972) The statistical theory of racism and sexism. Amer. Econom. Rev. 62(4):659–661.Google Scholar
  • Phelps R (2005) Defending Standardized Testing (Psychology Press, New York).CrossrefGoogle Scholar
  • Reardon SF (2011) The widening academic achievement gap between the rich and the poor: New evidence and possible explanations. Duncan GJ, Murnane RJ, eds. Whither Opportunity? Rising Inequality, Schools, and Children’s Life Chances (Russell Sage Foundation, New York), 91–116.Google Scholar
  • Reeves R, Halikias D (2017) Race Gaps in SAT Scores Highlight Inequality and Hinder Upward Mobility (Brookings Institution, Washington, DC).Google Scholar
  • Rothstein JM (2004) College performance predictions and the SAT. J. Econom. 121(1–2):297–317.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
  • Saul S (2023) If affirmative action ends, college admissions may be changed forever. New York Times (January 16), https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/15/us/affirmative-action-admissions-scotus.html.Google Scholar
  • Schmill S (2022) We are reinstating our SAT/ACT requirement for future admissions cycles. MIT Admission Blog (March 28), https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/we-are-reinstating-our-sat-act-requirement-for-future-admissions-cycles/.Google Scholar
  • Selingo J (2020) Who Gets In and Why: A Year Inside College Admissions (Scribner, New York).Google Scholar
  • Sinclair SR, Banerjee S, Yu CL (2022) Sequential fair allocation: Achieving the optimal envy-efficiency tradeoff curve. ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Rev. 50(1):95–96.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
  • Smilowitz K, Keppler S (2020) On the use of operations research and management in public education systems. INFORMS TutORials in Operations Research: Pushing the Boundaries: Frontiers in Impactful OR/OM Research (INFORMS, Catonsville, MD), 84–105.LinkGoogle Scholar
  • Tomkins S, Grossman J, Page LC, Goel S (2023) Showing high-achieving college applicants past admissions outcomes increases undermatching. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 120(45):e2306017120.Google Scholar
  • UC Standardized Testing Task Force (2020) Report of the UC Academic Council Standardized Testing Task Force. senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/underreview/sttf-report.pdf.Google Scholar
  • Zwick R (2002) Fair Game?: The Use of Standardized Admissions Tests in Higher Education (Psychology Press, RoutledgeFalmer, New York).Google Scholar
INFORMS site uses cookies to store information on your computer. Some are essential to make our site work; Others help us improve the user experience. By using this site, you consent to the placement of these cookies. Please read our Privacy Statement to learn more.