Georgia won’t demand SAT, ACT tests to enter most public colleges. Georgia is the venue of twenty-six public universities and colleges. Students applying to twenty-three of them will not need to take the SAT or ACT college tests to apply.
As reported, the Regents voted this past Wednesday “to let students apply without the tests through the 2024-2025 school year.” As described, the reasoning of the Regents was that “the University System of Georgia officials told them that renewed testing requirements would likely drive students to other colleges.”
Tests will remain required at the University of Georgia and Georgia Tech, while Georgia College and State University in Milledgeville will resume a testing requirement in what Chancellor Sonny Perdue characterized as an experiment to examine how requiring the exams affects applications. No reference was made to the quality of the applicants.
Chancellor Perdue left open the possibility “that he could ask regents to permanently abolish testing requirements at many universities.” Some background information regarding testing discloses that “tests have never been required at many of Georgia’s nine state colleges, intended to be the least selective of the state’s four tiers of schools.
However, as reported, tests have been required for admission to the state’s 17 public universities until the COVID-19 pandemic struck. The testing services “were unable to guarantee the exams would be available.” This risk of unavailable test results led to the system “suspending testing requirements” and admitting students based only on high school grades. Students who submit optional tests may be admitted with lower grades.”
Notable in the decision to eliminate testing was the rationale that that applications fell when testing was reimposed and “and that many students didn’t finish their applications for lack of a test score.” Regents hastily again made tests optional for all but the University of Georgia and Georgia Tech in March 2022, but Scot Lingrell, the system’s vice chancellor for enrollment management and student affairs, said it was already too late for student numbers last fall to recover.
