More than 80% of four-year colleges in the U.S. no longer require SAT or ACT scores for admission, a shift that accelerated during the pandemic and has largely held. But counselors, admissions consultants and financial aid advisers say the change is producing a side effect few families anticipated: less information about where students actually stand academically – and, in some cases, costly missteps in how college savings are structured.
Placement exams are surfacing gaps GPAs didn’t show
One local case illustrates the pattern advisors describe. A high school senior with a 4.2 weighted GPA and four years of honors coursework was admitted to every college on her list without ever sitting for the SAT or ACT. Her family saw no reason to add a standardized test to an already demanding senior year.
The first outside measurement of her academic standing came months later, in the form of freshman placement exams. She placed two courses below where her transcript indicated, in both math and writing.
“She had the grades,” her mother said. “A test score felt like it was just there to trip her up.”
Admissions consultants say the case is not unusual. Colleges that don’t require testing at the application stage still frequently require placement exams once students enroll — exams that can carry real costs, including remedial coursework that doesn’t count toward a degree and delayed graduation timelines.
“Families sometimes treat test-optional as test-irrelevant,” one consultant who works with high schoolers said. “But a test score was never really about getting past a gatekeeper. It was one of the only standardized data points a family had to check their own assumptions against.”
Grade inflation compounds the problem, researchers say
National transcript studies have tracked a steady rise in average high school GPAs over the past two decades, even as standardized test scores nationally have held flat or declined. Advisors point to retake policies, extended deadlines and lighter penalties for late work – now common in many districts – as factors that can lift a GPA without a proportional gain in mastery.
The result, they say, is transcripts that look uniformly strong but reveal little about where a specific student stands relative to a broader population – information the SAT and ACT used to supply by default to nearly every applicant.
Test-prep and tutoring companies report that demand for outside diagnostic tools hasn’t disappeared even as fewer students are required to test. The College Review, a Cleveland-area company founded in 1989, is among those now marketing standalone diagnostic assessments as a way to flag academic gaps before they surface on a college syllabus.
A second, less-visible issue: how savings accounts are titled
Financial aid advisers flag a separate and unrelated issue that they say catches families just as often: the legal ownership structure of college savings.
Assets held in a custodial account under a student’s name – commonly a UTMA account – are assessed at a significantly higher rate under the federal financial aid formula than assets held in a parent’s name. Families who move money into a child’s name years earlier, often on a bank adviser’s recommendation for tax purposes, sometimes don’t learn about the aid-formula difference until a FAFSA submission returns a lower-than-expected offer.
Advisors say the mismatch is rarely due to bad intent. “It’s usually a well-meaning recommendation for tax advantages, made without walking through how it interacts with aid formulas years down the road,” one adviser said.
What counselors and advisers are recommending
Financial planners and admissions consultants interviewed on the topic point to three steps they say families should take before senior year, not after:
Take the SAT or ACT at least once, even when applying to test-optional schools, to establish an outside benchmark alongside GPA.
Ask a school counselor directly how the high school’s grading and retake policies compare with those of neighboring districts.
Review how any college savings accounts are titled, and how that titling will be treated on the FAFSA, well before the aid application is due.
Advisors say the underlying issue in both cases is the same: information that used to reach families automatically – through a test score or a savings account statement – now requires families to seek it out themselves, earlier than they may expect.