Should You Submit Test Scores to a Test-Optional School?

If a school is genuinely test-optional and your score sits at or above the middle of the range that school publishes for admitted students who submitted, send it. If it sits well below that range, don't — and you will not be penalized for the omission. The schools that publish a position on this state it plainly. The useful part is the band in between, and the most concrete guidance any college publishes on it comes from Tufts, which encourages applicants with a 1300 SAT or a 28 ACT to include their scores.

The more important point is that this is not one decision. It is made separately for every college on your list, it is made inside the application itself rather than by sending or withholding a score report, and there are places where a score is not optional at all even when admission is — merit scholarships, state aid programs, and course placement after you enroll. A student can be admitted test-optional to a university and still be required to produce a score before registering for classes.

What does "test-optional" actually mean?

Less than the phrase suggests, because it is four or five different policies wearing one name. Common App sorts its members' testing policies into five categories, and the distinctions matter:

Common App publishes each member's category in its first-year requirements grid, a downloadable PDF updated through the season, where the codes read A, S, N, F, and I. That grid is the fastest way to see the whole list at once, though the college's own admissions page remains the authority.

The scale of the shift is worth knowing before you agonize over the decision. In Common App's end-of-season report for 2025–26, published in August 2026, the share of member institutions requiring a test score was 5% — down from about 55% in 2019–20, and near the all-time low of 4% in 2023–24. For the overwhelming majority of the roughly 1,150 Common App colleges, this is a real choice rather than a formality.

Applicant behavior is moving the other way. That same report found the number of applicants reporting a score grew 11% year over year while the number not reporting fell 5%, and that applicants reporting a score outnumbered those who did not for the first time since 2019–20. Common App also found that first-generation applicants, applicants from below-median-income ZIP codes, and applicants eligible for a fee waiver remained less likely to report a score — a reminder that submission rates track access to testing, not just score quality.

Are you actually penalized for not submitting?

The schools that address this directly say no, and they are unusually specific about it.

Now the honest counterweight, because a post that stopped there would be selling you something. Princeton reinstated its requirement after looking at its own data, and published the finding: a review of five years of test-optional admissions "found that academic performance at Princeton was stronger for students who chose to submit test scores than for students who did not," concluding that testing "is among the tools that can be helpful in indicating potential for academic success at Princeton." A school can mean it when it says a non-submitter is not disadvantaged, and still conclude that the scores carry information.

What none of these schools publish is an admit rate split by submitter status. If you encounter a confident figure claiming that submitters are admitted at some multiple of the rate of non-submitters, check whether it names a school and a source, because that comparison is confounded anyway — the students who submit are the students whose scores help.

One more thing worth noticing: Notre Dame states that its "Admission Officers are not able to advise on whether students should submit a particular test score." Calling the admissions office will not resolve this for you. The decision is yours, which is why it is worth having a method.

How do you decide, school by school?

Start with the only number a college publishes that speaks to this directly: the score range of its admitted or enrolled students who submitted.

Tufts is the rare school that turns that into an explicit recommendation. Its guidance is "we encourage applicants with scores of 1300 or higher on the SAT, or 28 or higher on the ACT to include those scores with their applications," and in the same breath it reports that admitted first-year submitters in the most recent cycle had SAT scores ranging from 1240 to 1600 and ACT composites from 26 to 36. Read those two sentences together and the logic becomes portable to schools that publish no threshold at all: the recommended floor sits slightly above the bottom of the admitted range, not at it. Tufts also notes that a score "even when they are below the middle 50% of our admitted cohort, can provide some evidence of academic preparation" — so the floor is a guideline, not a cliff.

Two adjustments to make before you compare yourself to any published range:

The published range is inflated, and you should expect it to be. At a test-optional school the reported percentiles describe only the students who chose to submit, and students submit when their scores help. The range of scores that were actually good enough to get in is wider and lower than the range you can see. We covered the mechanics of this in how to build a balanced college list — it is the same trap that lives in item C9 of a school's Common Data Set, which reports scores for enrolled students, one more filter removed from the students who applied.

Check what share of the class submitted at all. Bowdoin, which eliminated its testing requirement in 1969 and was the first American college to do so, reports that "fifty percent of students in the most recent incoming class chose not to submit their scores." At a school where half the class did not submit, not submitting is unremarkable. At a school where nearly everyone does, an omission stands out more — not as a penalty, but as a decision the reader will notice.

Put together, a usable rule: submit if your score is at or above the median of the school's published submitter range, don't if you are meaningfully below the 25th percentile, and in between let the rest of the application break the tie. If your transcript is the strongest thing you have and the score is merely fine, the score adds little. If your transcript has a soft patch that a score would contextualize, it adds more.

Where is a score not really optional?

This is the part that costs families money, because it is discovered in the spring.

Merit scholarships often require what admission does not. The University of Arkansas offers a test-optional application for students with a 3.2 GPA or higher, and states on the same page that "test scores are required for most scholarship opportunities," adding that the state of Arkansas requires an ACT or SAT score for its Academic Challenge and Governor's Distinguished scholarships. (test scores for admission)

Some schools go out of their way to close that gap, and it is worth knowing which. Boston University's test-optional policy covers "all undergraduate schools and colleges at BU, as well as all scholarship programs" (test policy). Vanderbilt states that all applicants who meet its December 1 merit scholarship deadline "will be considered whether or not test scores are submitted." When a school says this explicitly, it is because the default assumption runs the other way.

A score may be required after you are admitted. Arkansas requires all admitted new first-year students to provide ACT, SAT, Accuplacer, or CLT scores for placement and enrollment purposes, and notes that students who do not are changed to non-degree-seeking status — a change that "may affect financial aid and scholarships, as well as the ability to participate in Greek life, intramural sports, and other activities." Submitting for placement does not affect a test-optional admission decision, but it is not skippable.

And some schools on the list may simply require a score. For a student applying now, six of the eight Ivies do, along with MIT, Caltech, Stanford, Georgetown, UT Austin, and Florida's public universities. The school-by-school picture, verified against each school's own admissions page, is in our guide to which colleges require the SAT or ACT. If one required school is on the list, the submit-or-not question is moot for the test itself — you are taking it — and only remains live for the optional schools.

How is the choice actually made in the application?

Not by choosing where to send an official score report. This surprises people, and it is where avoidable mistakes happen.

The choice usually lives in the college-specific questions. Bowdoin's page is clear about the mechanics: applicants indicate on the application whether they want scores reviewed, and "for applicants using the Common Application, these questions are located in the Bowdoin-specific questions section." Bowdoin also lets applicants select some test types and not others — using the SAT but not the ACT, for instance.

The deadline for changing your mind varies. Bowdoin gives applicants "until the application deadline to suppress their scores." Tufts is the opposite: it asks before submission, and "once students submit their application for admission, the answer selected in the application cannot be changed." Do not assume the more forgiving rule.

Self-reporting is not universal. Tufts and Bowdoin both accept self-reported scores, with verification required on enrollment. Princeton does not: applicants "must submit your SAT and/or ACT scores to Princeton directly from the testing firms." That distinction matters for timing, because an official report from the agency takes longer to arrive than a number typed into a form.

Score choice and superscoring differ too. Princeton allows SAT score choice, takes only the highest ACT composite, encourages sending all scores, and does not superscore between the paper and digital tests. Tufts and Bowdoin both superscore. These are per-school rules, and they change what "submitting" even means.

Within Common App itself, the testing section is self-reported and reversible before submission: answering "No" to reporting scores clears the section from future submissions, and Common App notes that previously entered scores reappear if you switch the answer back to "Yes." Nothing is lost by entering scores while you decide.

Does the policy on the page even apply to you?

Often, but not always — and the exceptions cluster in exactly the groups least likely to check.

Common App's requirements grid carries the caveat in its own notes: the listed testing policy "applies to US citizens/permanent residents, of traditional college age, applying for full-time, degree-seeking status," and "may vary for applicants who are transfers, non-US citizens/permanent residents, non-traditional age, or home-schooled."

Individual schools resolve this differently, so read the actual sentence. Vanderbilt's test-optional policy "applies to both first-year and transfer students and includes international and homeschool students," though proof of English proficiency is still required for international applicants. Princeton exempts active military personnel from its upcoming requirement outright, because access to testing centers is genuinely constrained by service. If you are a transfer, an international applicant, homeschooled, or returning to school later, confirm the policy for your category rather than the headline one.

What if you have not tested yet?

Then the real constraint is a registration deadline, not a test date, and the two tests are not on the same clock.

For the SAT, registration closes about two weeks before the test. College Board's dates and deadlines list the October 3, 2026 test with a September 18 registration deadline, November 7 with an October 23 deadline, and December 5 with a November 20 deadline, each followed by a short late-registration window.

For the ACT the gap is much longer — about five weeks. ACT's test dates show October 17, 2026 with a September 11 registration deadline and a September 29 late deadline, and December 12 with a November 6 deadline.

Then work backward from the earliest round you are applying to, using each school's stated cutoff rather than a general rule. Tufts publishes its own: the latest dates it can consider are the October ACT or November SAT for Early Decision I, and the December ACT or December SAT for Early Decision II and Regular Decision. Other schools cut earlier. The binding constraint is the earliest deadline on your list, not the average one.

Our senior year college application timeline lays these dates out against the Common App, FAFSA, and early deadlines they have to fit around. And if a test is in play, it is not the test most parents sat — the SAT is now digital, section-adaptive, and about two hours long, which is covered in what actually changed on the digital SAT.

What to do this week

Four things, in order, and none of them take an evening:

  1. Sort your list into required, optional, and ignored using each school's own admissions page. This determines whether you have a decision at all.
  2. For each optional school, find its published submitter range and note where you fall against the median, remembering that the range is inflated by self-selection.
  3. Check the scholarship page separately from the admissions page. This is the step that gets skipped, and it is the one with money attached.
  4. Find where the submit-or-not question lives in each application, and whether it can be changed after submission. Do this before you are filling out the form at 11 p.m. on a deadline.

If you take one thing from this: the question is not "are my scores good enough." It is "good enough for which school, for which scholarship, and by which deadline." Those have different answers, and only the last one expires.