From the Office of Undergraduate Admission:
Dear Members of the Fordham Community,
Beginning with the fall 2021 entering class, Fordham University will make standardized admissions tests—the SAT and ACT—optional for a two-year period, at the end of which the University will revisit the policy.
On April 29, the National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC) urged institutions to reassess their standardized testing policies, especially in light of the effects the COVID-19 pandemic is having on academic schedules. We have done so but must also acknowledge that this is a policy the University had been considering before the pandemic. There has been ongoing dialogue in the admission community about the racial and socioeconomic disparities that standardized testing reinforces and exacerbates. We too acknowledge these concerns, even more so now with the additional stressors placed on so many students and families by the pandemic.
Fordham has always employed a holistic admission process to counterbalance the aforementioned forces implicit in testing; making those tests optional is the logical next step, and consistent with the University’s mission and Jesuit identity. In the spirit of caring for the whole person, the Office of Undergraduate Admission will continue to develop new ways to keep the student central to our focus as we build our campus community.
From our experience with a holistic admission process, we know that academic rigor does not need to be sacrificed in order to level the playing field, and that we can engage in a quality assessment process without prioritizing those applicants who choose to submit test scores. Our test-optional plan will distinctly yet fairly consider students who submit and who do not submit testing. We will continue to seek students who can thrive at Fordham—students who can discover themselves and their new intellectual horizons; students who want to learn to think rigorously, write persuasively, and act in service of the human family.
In the coming weeks, we will share more details on this policy on the Fordham University Undergraduate Admission website.
John W. Buckley
Vice President for Admission and Student Financial Services
Click here for Fordham’s Dean of Undergraduate Admissions, Patricia Peek’s interview on CBS 2 New York on schools going test-optional due to COVID-19.
