Which colleges require the SAT for 2026-27 admissions

Among the most selective universities in the United States, test-optional is now the exception rather than the rule. Of the twelve institutions checked for this page, ten require the SAT or ACT for 2026-27 applications and two remain optional, both with a reinstatement date already announced.

Every entry below was read on that institution’s own admissions page on August 27, 2026. Nothing here comes from a third-party aggregator.

The list, verified on August 27, 2026

Institution	Policy for 2026-27 (fall 2027 entry)	Notes
Harvard	Required	AP, IB, GCSE/A-Level or national leaving exams accepted in exceptional cases
Yale	Required	“All first-year and transfer applicants must include scores from the ACT or SAT”
Brown	Required	Required since the 2024-25 cycle; superscores SAT and ACT
Dartmouth	Required (US schools)	Superscored automatically; alternatives for applicants outside the US
Cornell	Required	In force from fall 2026 entry onward, all undergraduate colleges
Penn	Required	Reinstated for the 2025-26 cycle; hardship waiver available
MIT	Required	“We require the SAT or the ACT for both prospective first year and transfer students”
Caltech	Required	Restored from fall 2025 entry; no ACT Writing or Science for fall 2027 applicants
Stanford	Required	Scores were optional for the class of 2029
UT Austin	Required	Official scores sent from the testing agency; no Essay, Writing or ACT Science
Princeton	Optional	Required from the 2027-28 cycle, for fall 2028 entry
Columbia	Optional	Requirement effective August 2027 for the 2027-28 cycle

What the two optional policies actually say

Princeton is explicit that opting out carries no penalty: “Students who opt to apply to Princeton in 2026-27 cycle without an ACT or SAT score will not be at a disadvantage in our process.” It has separately announced that first-year and transfer applicants seeking to enroll in fall 2028 will need to submit SAT or ACT scores.

Columbia College and Columbia Engineering remain test-optional for 2026-27, meaning applicants for fall 2027 entry choose whether to submit. From August 2027 they will require first-year and transfer applicants to submit ACT or SAT results, with a waiver available for applicants who face challenges meeting the requirement.

If you are a current junior applying in the 2027-28 cycle, both of those schools are test-required for you.

Test-optional is not test-blind

These are separate policies and the difference decides what you do.

Test-optional means you choose whether to send a score. If you send it, it is read alongside everything else in the file. Test-blind means the college does not consider scores at all, even if you send them. None of the twelve institutions above is test-blind.

At a test-optional college, submitting a score is a decision with a real consequence, not a formality. The relevant comparison is your score against the range that college publishes for its enrolled students, which appears in its Common Data Set. We do not reproduce those ranges here because they change annually and each college publishes its own.

What we can give you is where you sit nationally. Among SAT takers, 1200 is the 75th percentile, 1360 the 90th and 1450 the 95th, using College Board’s published SAT User Group figures. The SAT percentile calculator and the percentile tables cover the rest of the scale, and average SAT score gives the class of 2025 cohort figures for context. Whether a given number is worth submitting to a specific college is a judgement only you can make against that college’s own published range.

Superscoring, where it applies

Several of the test-required colleges take your best section scores across sittings rather than your best single date. Brown states it will superscore the SAT or ACT or both. Dartmouth superscores automatically across multiple administrations. UT Austin, by contrast, uses the highest score from one test date.

This changes the arithmetic of a retake considerably. If a college superscores, a sitting that improves only your Math score still helps. If it does not, the whole composite has to move. The SAT superscore calculator works out the combination, and the SAT score needed calculator tells you what a specific section has to reach to hit a target total.

The ACT Science question

The enhanced ACT made Science and Writing optional add-ons that do not affect the Composite, which is now the average of English, Math and Reading. Several colleges have updated their language to match.

Yale requires English, Mathematics, Reading and the Composite, with Science and Writing optional. Brown made ACT Science optional from spring 2025 in alignment with the changes to the exam. Caltech does not require ACT Writing or Science subscores for fall 2027 applicants. UT Austin does not require the ACT Science section or Writing.

If you are weighing the two tests, the ACT score calculator uses the current three-section Composite, and the SAT to ACT conversion tool shows why any crosswalk between them carries published standard errors of plus or minus 2 ACT points and plus or minus 80 SAT points.

Policies change mid-cycle. Check before you apply.

This is the part to take seriously. Between 2020 and 2026 every institution in the table above changed its testing policy at least once, and several announced changes less than a year before they took effect. Cornell’s requirement was announced in 2024 for fall 2026 entry. Columbia’s was announced with the switch landing in August 2027.

Three practical consequences:

A list published in August can be wrong by December. Confirm each college on its own admissions site in the month you actually submit.

Policies can differ by school within one university. Columbia’s reinstatement was announced for Columbia College and Columbia Engineering specifically. Cornell’s applies to all of its undergraduate colleges, which is worth knowing because it has not always.

A requirement announced for “fall 2028 entry” applies to the application cycle that starts the previous autumn. Princeton’s fall 2028 requirement affects students applying in autumn 2027, not autumn 2028.

What to do with this

If every college on your list requires scores, the decision is made and the only question is timing. Score release for the fall 2026 SAT dates runs 13 days after test day, and the SAT score release dates guide has the calendar against which you can check application deadlines.

If some are optional, the decision is per-college, not global. You can submit to one and not another. Work from each college’s published range for enrolled students and your own percentile, not from a general rule about what score is “good enough”. Our data sources page lists every primary source behind the figures on this site.

Verified on August 27, 2026. Each policy above was read on the linked institutional page on that date. This page is not affiliated with any of these institutions, and their pages, not this one, are authoritative.