Due to the current difficulty in taking the ACT and SAT, most colleges across the country have decided to allow applicants to not send in test scores with their application. In fact, the UC system has promised that no matter what, they will not look at the test scores while considering which students to admit.

This is very helpful for many of this year’s seniors, including Coral Shafer ’21, who scheduled several tests and had each one canceled one after another. Shafer mentioned that she tried to schedule for tests farther from the Bay Area, but found that anywhere she tried to go, the test would be canceled.

As such, when it was made clear that she would not need a test score for her applications, it relieved much of the anxiety from the process. As Melissa Nagar, Riordan’s head of college counseling, put it, “Colleges are being very accommodating because of the pandemic.”

In fact, standardized testing may be permanently eliminated or made optional. Both Nagar and Nate Simon, the Dean of Academics, believe that it is a major possibility, and that it would benefit many students who do not perform as well on tests like the ACT or SAT.

“I think there’s a decent chance that they’ll stay optional. My hope is that this kind of forces the industry, the testing industry, to come up with some alternative and more effective way of measuring student achievement,” said Simon.

Both also pointed out that while many schools were already beginning to move away from requiring the SAT or ACT, some colleges have contracts with the College Board that prevent them from completely removing the test scores from their application process for now.