Pressure on students to ace their SATs and ACTs would ease under legislation aimed at giving Colorado colleges and universities the choice — rather than a mandate — to consider scores on the national standardized tests in their admissions processes.
All of the state’s public, four-year higher-education institutions are backing House Bill 21-1067, which would revise the state statute requiring public Colorado colleges and universities to consider first-time freshmen’s SAT or ACT scores during admissions.
Instead, students could choose whether to submit those scores or not.
The bill cleared its first hurdle this week, passing out of the House Education Committee on a 7-2 vote Thursday, with Rep. Colin Larson, R-Littleton, and Rep. Tim Geitner, R-Falcon, dissenting. During hours of testimony from students, local university admissions employees and education experts, nobody spoke in opposition to the bill.
College administrators support doing away with the requirement, arguing that not only are there better measures of a student’s future collegiate success, but that reliance on the test scores is an equity issue, favoring students with the means to pay for tutoring, preparation and multiple test opportunities and placing a barrier in front of marginalized students’ college careers.
“To the traditionally underserved students that reside in Colorado — from Pell-eligible to rural to maybe a low performer on tests — test scores present an artificial barrier,” said Clark Brigger, executive director of admissions at the University of Colorado Boulder. “By allowing higher education to go test-optional, it’s still a student’s prerogative to use a test score or not. It only advantages students.”
Marginalized students tend to have lower test scores for a variety of reasons, local education experts said.
More affluent households can afford to pay for students to take the tests more than the one free chance high school juniors receive, Brigger said. Those who can finance tutoring and test preparation resources would also be at an advantage, he noted.
“If it’s a student with parents that never attended a college or university, the exam might not be as significant a priority to them, too,” said Carl Einhaus, senior director of student success and academic affairs at the Colorado Department of Higher Education. “Being a first-generation college student is definitely a factor.”
Molly Frommelt, Jesse Alardin Rivera and Eyob Abai are all first-generation college students attending CU Boulder. The trio testified in support of the bill on Thursday.
Frommelt recalled stressing about taking a day off from her daycare job in high school to take the ACT and only being able to take the test once, whereas her more affluent peers had opportunities to pay for additional chances to up their scores. Now, Frommelt is one of three student body presidents at the university.
Aldardin Rivera said that, as a first-generation American, his family was focused on putting food on the table and not so much on standardized testing.
Abai said being the first in his family to pursue a college degree along with being a first-generation American meant he had obstacles to overcome outside of academics.
“How was I going to succeed and how was I going to ensure a four-hour exam accurately portrays my intellectual capabilities?” said Abai, who was originally not accepted into CU Boulder’s Leeds School of Business, but got in his sophomore year. “That exam did not accurately represent me. If you ask anyone and then you see my exam scores, things don’t match up. I wasn’t admitted to the Leeds School of Business because the school has a very high standard for what their admission are. I didn’t get in. I now sit here as president of that school.”
To investigate how deeply socioeconomic backgrounds impact Colorado students’ SAT scores, the executive director of admissions at the Colorado School of Mines, Dale Gaubatz, conducted an analysis sorting the SAT scores of students graduating between 2021 and 2024 by Colorado zip code using 2019 socioeconomic data.
He found a student’s SAT score may be more predictive of their socioeconomic background than their ability to thrive in college.
When the zip codes were sorted by the highest percentage of families living at or below the poverty line, only three zip codes in the top 50 of that list had half of their students score an 1100 or higher out of a maximum 1600. Gaubatz said an SAT score of 1060 is considered “college eligible.”
Seventeen out of those same 50 zip codes contained no students who scored a 1400 or better — a score Gaubatz described as significant for earning scholarship opportunities at highly selective universities such as the School of Mines.
However, when Gaubatz sorted the zip codes by the highest percentage of adults with graduate degrees, he found 44 of the top 50 zip codes had at least half of their students score an 1100 or higher, above college eligible. Ten of the most educated zip codes contained at least 15% of students who scored a 1400 or better, setting them up for scholarship opportunities. Nationally, approximately 4% of all SAT test-takers score in this range.
“It’s pretty stark,” Gaubatz said. “The difference is incredible.”
Sen. Janet Buckner, D-Aurora, one of the bill sponsors who said she and her daughter were not good test-takers, stressed if the bill passed, students who want to could still submit their test scores for admissions consideration.
Additionally, Buckner said, the bill contains a data and reporting component in which universities would need to submit an annual report on their freshmen classes, breaking out categories like race and ethnicity and the percentage of students who are first-generation or Pell-eligible to determine if the change was helping vulnerable students.
“We’re not saying you cannot submit your test, and I’m not saying kids should not try to reach their highest academic level either,” Buckner said. “This is an asset to those kids who… have the whole package, but they just don’t test well. I was one of those kids. I started believing the many negatives things that were told to me as a young person when I didn’t test well, unfortunately. I was told I couldn’t be successful, and that’s just not true.”
Colleges already consider an array of factors outside of test scores when deciding which students to admit.
High school grade-point average was found to be five times more likely to predict college graduation rates than ACT scores, according to research published by the University of Chicago in 2020.
At CU Boulder, Brigger said admissions staff holistically review students, accounting for areas such as the rigor of classes taken in high school along with grades and extra-curricular activities.
Nathan Cadena is the chief operating officer at the Denver Scholarship Foundation, which helps primarily marginalized students access postsecondary opportunities. He said there are indicators of a student’s college success that venture beyond academic performance, such as whether a student has a job and helps support their family, their work ethic and whether they have job-shadowed or apprenticed.
“Even students who weren’t naturally academically gifted, especially in low-income populations, we’ve seen different attributes culturally that help students thrive,” Cadena said. “There are so many non-measurable attributes that can really mean most students can be successful, especially if they gain admissions to a system that is competitive for them and well-suited. GPA and test scores are really what students see in the mirror when they’re trying to assess their feasibility of even applying for a competitive school, and this bill could be a game-changer for that.”
Colorado already gave test-optional a test spin this school year.
Gov. Jared Polis signed a bill eliminating the requirement for 2021’s incoming freshmen to submit their SAT or ACT scores after many school districts canceled the exams because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The test-optional model also wouldn’t be unique to Colorado.
Last year, the University of California waived the standardized testing requirement for all undergraduates for at least a few years. The California State University system did the same along with the University of Oregon and other peer institutions.
“SATs on a national stage are going to become less important for students, and to go backward to requiring a test would be an absolute gift to all the other schools across the country trying to recruit students out of Colorado to go to their institutions,” said Gaubatz, who added that Mines competitor Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts announced this week that it will no longer consider SAT or ACT scores at all. “They would probably send us thank you letters because it would make it so much easier for them.”
