 I want you to understand what happens when you decide to go test optional and whether or not you should go test optional. Was test optional just a bunch of bullshit? Recently at the IACAC conference, I learned a lot about this test optional topic. I was talking to university representatives from all over the United States and I even sat into a special session where I listened to several different admissions officers tell us about their policies. And along the way, I learned a lot about test optional policies, what they mean and what happens to your application when you apply test optional. And that's what I wanna share with you today. What happens when you apply test optional? Can you really get in as a test optional student? We're gonna give you three basic rules to help you decide if you should go test optional or not. Test optional is not the only policy that universities have though, so we should talk about the other ones. Let's start with the easiest one, the mandatory testing policies. One in every three universities in the United States requires the SAT or ACT for an application. Those are the mandatory testing schools. With these universities, it's clear, if you don't send a test score, your application is not complete and therefore will not be considered. And then we've got the opposite extreme, we've got the test blind schools. A test blind university is one that will not look at your test score. You can try to send it to them, but they won't accept it, they won't open it and they won't look at it. Then we have test optional, which sits right in the middle. A test optional university will tell you that you don't have to send a test score, but you can if you want, but if you don't, nothing bad will happen, or is that true? That's the part where things get a little bit tricky. See, going test optional means that other factors in your application are going to become more important, and the word that I kept hearing over and over and over again at the conference was rigor. What is rigor and why is rigor so important? Rigor is essentially how hard your school was. Universities use a lot of things to determine how rigorous your school system was. If your school system is not going to be considered as rigorous as some of the ones in the United States, then going test optional is probably going to hurt you. If you go test optional and then the next thing they have to consider now are your grades and the rigor of your school and you come from a less rigorous system like ours in Peru with only 11 years of education, you're hurting yourself. You're asking the admissions officer to focus on one of your weak points instead of showing them a strong point. Rule number one is based on rigor. If your school is less rigorous than what we see in the United States, then you should not go test optional. If your school is more rigorous than what we see in the United States, then go ahead and be test optional. If you got great IB scores, you're probably okay. The second thing you need to consider is how important the test score is to that university. Some test optional universities still value the SAT and ACT very highly. Recently I was talking to a family who wanted to apply to Brigham Young University and when you take a look at their common data set, everybody needs to know this document. I've talked about it before. Learn about the common data set, go find your university's data set, read it. Their common data set makes it abundantly clear that test scores are considered very important. If the CDS marks the test score as very important or important and not just considered, then you really should consider taking a test to apply to that university. It's their way of saying, yeah, it's optional, but like, we really like it. That's rule number two. If the university tells you that test scores are important or very important, you should not go test optional. Listen to what they're trying to tell you. The third factor are the rest of the students around you. If everybody else is bringing a test score, then you probably need to bring a test score too. How can you tell what percentage of people bring test scores to a university? Check the CDS. I talked about this on my episode about Ivy League universities. If you look at the CDS, you can see the percentage of students who enrolled last year and how many of them brought SAT or ACT scores. In some cases, this number is over 100%, which means that people are doing both tests. If everybody applying is bringing a test score, then so should you. That's rule number three. You gotta keep up with the other people applying to the same university as you. So if you're trying to decide whether or not you should go test optional, keep in mind those three things. Number one, is your rigor better than the rigor of the schools in the United States? If so, you can probably go test optional. Does the university say that they only consider test scores or do they consider them very important? If they're not that big of a deal to the university, they don't have to be a big deal to you. And finally, pay attention to what other students are doing. If the majority of the people entering a university are bringing test scores, you probably should do it as well so that you stay competitive. Going test optional, I think is a good thing. And personally, I'm not a fan of the SAT. I would love nothing more than to see all universities go test blind, but that's probably never going to happen. You do have to take test scores if you're an international student and you're looking to get into these really competitive universities. But what about universities that aren't so competitive? In other cases, we do see a lot of test optional students getting admitted and in less competitive, less selective universities, it doesn't seem to be a big deal if you don't bring a test score. So if you want to go test optional, keep in mind that you may have to lower your standards just a little bit. The problem is that a lot of these best universities are also the ones that give full ride scholarships. Naturally, a lot of people are going to compete for those scholarships. And so a test score becomes really important if you want to get a full ride scholarship. In my conversations with admissions officers and listening to these talks at the conference, it became really clear to me that a lot of these universities really do want to be test optional and they really do care about more than just your test scores. But at the same time, they have to work with what they've got. And if a lot of students are bringing in test scores that are really high, then they're going to kind of expect to see the same thing from you. And if you don't have a test score, then they're going to focus on other aspects of your application. They all become a little more important. So is the rest of your application good enough to get in? That's what you have to ask yourself. If you're not sure if you should go test optional or not, then go ahead and leave a comment below. Tell us about your situation and I'll be happy to give you my advice. Go and look at the data for yourself. Analyze it and see if it makes sense to apply to that university as a test optional applicant. I appreciate you guys watching this at the end. It means a lot to me and I hope it's been helpful for you. I'm always looking to find important topics that you need to know about for your applications to university and I know that it's difficult sometimes to know what to do, especially when you've got this optional environment and there's so many choices available. So hopefully you can take some of this advice and use it to make your decisions so that you can get into the university that's the right fit for you. So thanks again for watching. I will see you next week.