Johns Hopkins University has announced a return to requiring standardized testing for admissions in the latest move by the school that reins in diversity, equity and inclusion practices.
The mid-August decision to require ACT or SAT scores for undergraduate admissions came at roughly the same time as the private, top-tier institution also told the campus community it will make a “posture of restraint” its default setting on university statements, meaning it is implementing institutional neutrality.
Campus leaders will only comment on topics “in the limited circumstances where an issue is clearly related to a direct, concrete, and demonstrable interest or function of the university,” administrators stated.
These two pivots also come roughly five months after its chief DEI officer stepped down amid a major scandal.
Sherita Golden left her role as chief diversity officer of Johns Hopkins Medicine and joined the faculty as a diabetes researcher instead. The March move came after she faced backlash for an email describing white, Christian, and English-speaking people as privileged.
Standardized testing for admissions at JHU will be required for applicants seeking entry for the fall 2026 semester, the university stated, adding it will still use a “holistic admissions process.”
“Over the past year, the university conducted a comprehensive review of the relevant academic research on testing and analyzed the university’s three years of test-optional admissions experience and related data. With input from faculty colleagues, the review concluded that test scores, when considered in context as part of a holistic approach to admissions, serve as an important predictive metric to assess the likelihood of a student’s academic success at Johns Hopkins,” the university stated.
“The review also found that the test-optional environment may have discouraged some applicants to Johns Hopkins from less-advantaged or underrepresented backgrounds from submitting test scores that would have provided an additional positive signal of their academic abilities.”
The argument was the same put forth by other elite institutions such as Harvard, Yale, Brown, Dartmouth, MIT and several others that have reinstituted SAT and ACT requirements within the last year or so.
However, “most of the universities in the United States still do not require applicants to submit standardized test scores,” the Epoch Times reported. “Some institutions, notably Columbia University and the California State University system, have permanently shifted to test-optional or test-free admissions.”
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