Prospective undergraduate students for the fall 2026 semester will be required to submit standardized test scores as a part of their application to the University of Miami for the first time since 2020.
“While we recognize the value of changing the policy during the pandemic, we have decided to go back to including this information as our data show that standardized test scores can be a predictor of academic success,” said Guillermo “Willy” Prado, interim executive vice president for academic affairs and provost.
The University will use standardized testing scores, including SAT and ACT test results, a high school transcript and other factors as part of its holistic review process. This means that when considering applicants, admissions officers will consider all parts of the application in the context of each student.
“These standardized test scores are only a complementary piece of the puzzle,” Prado said. “We consider a wide array of information in our admissions decisions and rely heavily on a student’s high school performance and grade point average, along with community involvement and many other factors.”
Adriana Alvarado, a junior studying biology on the pre-med track, is against requiring standardized tests in college applications.
“I honestly think that standardized testing is an archaic form of measuring someone’s intelligence,” Alvarado said. “I believe that standardized testing hinders someone’s abilities to get to where they wanna get in life.”
UM joins other Association of American Universities AAU partner institutions who also recently began requiring test scores on their applications again, including Brown University, Dartmouth College, The Johns Hopkins University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Texas at Austin. All Florida public colleges require test scores.
Christopher Tienken, an associate professor of leadership, management and policy at Seton Hall University, published a study in 2016 on how he and his team could accurately predict the percentage of students at a school who would perform well on the state standardized tests.
“These tests are not measuring how much students learned or can learn,” Tienken said in an interview with Forbes. “They are predominately measuring the family and community capital of the student.”
Standardized tests are often associated with important outcomes – graduation, careers and sometimes school funding.
“Standardized tests cause anxiety to those who take these tests,” Alvarado said. “I can be a good “normal” test taker, but when it comes to a test like the SAT or the MCAT I perform poorly.”
The School of Education at American University states that “standardized tests fail to account for students who learn and demonstrate academic proficiency in different ways.”
A 2022 study by ACT found evidence of grade inflation in high school seniors’ GPA between 2010-2021, most notably during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021. Grade inflation is when a student is given a grade that does not align with the content mastery measured by the ACT.
“Grade inflation makes college admissions more challenging and confusing for students, who need accurate, meaningful grades to tell the whole story of their academic success,” Godwin said. “Grade inflation also limits students’ ability to meaningfully gauge their academic readiness for college work and select a college where they are likely to thrive.”
To learn more about the University of Miami’s admissions process and requirements, visit admissions.miami.edu.