Several months ago, I sluggishly pulled myself out of my bed to prepare myself for another 13-hour day of classes at my international high school in Beijing. I looked down at my phone in dismay as I read the newest headline: Colorado public universities have joined the ranks of other U.S universities in lifting the standardized testing requirements for universities. Colorado institutions of higher learning have joined those in Washington and California to de-emphasize the SAT & ACT in college admissions. For Chinese international students like myself, these changes represent a new challenge and source of uncertainty in a time of increasing competition for acceptance into elite American universities.
U.S academics and administrators have argued that test-taking abilities don't gauge a student's performance correctly. Some professors criticized SAT vocabulary since it is not like "human language" and creates confusion when students write essays during college courses. Also, they believed that SAT is a poor predictor of a student's college academic performance. Elite universities have claimed to focus more on students' GPA and essays, ensuring they can thoroughly perform.
 U.S colleges trust that ignoring SAT during admission is a shortcut to decrease inequality and increase diversity within their freshman classes. But is this the case? As a Chinese international student, I have been impacted by dropping the SAT. While removing SAT may provide opportunities for some underrepresented groups, it is essential to consider how such a drastic change may function to decrease diversity in the university. Specifically, these policies disproportionally affect Chinese students and families, who are significant participants in the U.S collegiate education system.
The policy of going SAT-blind may actually be less effective in reducing inequality than suggested by its proponents. While selective universities still have the challenging task of selecting a relatively small number of highly qualified students from a large pool of applicants, removing standardized tests from the equation boosts the relative importance of extracurricular activities and personal essays. However, those soft traits of an applicant depend heavily on one's family income and schedule. The content of such essays appear to be closely connected with one's family income level; there is an essay in New York Times demonstrating that when discussing a significant challenge that student had ever conquered, the students from high-income families are more likely to write about a traveling experience or a relationship failures. In contrast, students from the working-class family might have written about economic insecurity and domestic instability. The top research and internship opportunities, which in turn produce more impressive topics for application essays, are also not open to lower-class families. Therefore, eliminating SAT scores may not function to reduce educational inequality in collegiate institutions.
Besides, the SAT-blind policy doesn't consider the current circumstance of Chinese students at all. According to Allison Otis, a former Harvard interviewer, extracurricular activities play a vital role during the admission process. Refraining from using SAT scores as a criterion without lowering admission standards means that students' extracurricular activities have to be more prominent, whereas Chinese schools' schedules and curricula don't allow us to do so. Many western students finish their school in the afternoon, and they can participate in clubs and sports in their available free time, whereas Chinese schools have much less available time to do non-academic activities. Take me as an example; I am currently in an international high school in Beijing, with our schedule starting from 7:30 am to 8:35 pm, which means that we have nearly 13 hours for classes per day. Moreover, since we are not native speakers, many Chinese students must attend weekend training classes focusing on AP and TOEFL to prepare themselves for American university life. These obligations diminish our opportunities to engage in extracurricular activities like American students do.
It is also worth mentioning that forbidding SAT indicates that universities take high school GPA instead to evaluate students' academic abilities since it appears to be directly correlated with one's future GPA in college. However, according to CNN news written by Shen Lu and Katie Hunt, many Chinese schools have a "complicated" GPA assessment system, making it unreliable among international students. In this context, SAT serves as an objective tool to evaluate students' academic level, and Chinese students can document their true intellectual capabilities through test performance. Eliminating SAT in the college application process would drastically decrease our ability to compete with American students.
Why do I hope U.S universities can reconsider their SAT policy? Because it's about the hopes and futures of many Chinese families. The admissions officers may not know that in China, where most working-class families regard their children's admission to school as a big goal in life,  lowering the application rate for Chinese students is not only on the students, but also on every family behind them. For some students around me, their families are in small cities. In order to provide their children with better educational resources, they choose to move to first-tier cities, do odd jobs, and every last bit of their savings to pay tuition for their children in hopes they can attend an American university. These parents do not understand the application details or the impact of the policy on their children; they can only see the result. They are willing to invest all their time and money to at least have the chance to compete at the same starting line as American students, and they want their children to get the life they want through their efforts. And colleges decided the SAT cancellation policy before how many parents got the message? Does this policy respect every student and family in a global sense? I think not.
Finally, I hope that U.S admission officers could reconsider going SAT-blind or at least include a greater plurality of voices as they make these choices. If Colorado universities and others in the United States hope to increase diversity in higher education, global voices, including those of Chinese students and parents, should be part of that conversation.