Howard Wainer

In 1969, Bowdoin College was path-breaking when it changed its admissions policy to make college admissions tests optional. About one-third of its accepted classes took advantage of this policy and did not submit SAT scores. I followed up on Bowdoin’s class of 1999 and found that the 106 students who did not submit SAT scores did substantially worse in their first-year grades than did their 273 classmates who did submit SAT scores (see Figure 1). Would their SAT scores, had they been available to Bowdoin’s admissions office, have predicted their diminished academic performance?

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