Dive Brief:
- The high school class of 2026 outperformed the previous year’s graduates on the SAT, according to results for the college admissions exam released Tuesday by the College Board
- The mean total SAT score for the class of 2026 reached 1045 — a 16-point increase from the class of 2025. Average scores increased in both the reading and writing section and in the math section, and scores rose for all student demographic groups.
- Despite more top-ranked colleges reinstating standardized testing requirements for undergraduate applicants after COVID-19 pauses, 90% of U.S. colleges remain test-optional for the high school class of 2027 college applicants, said nonprofit group Fair Test.
Dive Insight:
This marked the second year in a row of SAT score gains, which the College Board hailed as showing signs of continued recovery from pandemic-era declines.
About 42% of the class of 2026 SAT-takers met or exceeded college and career readiness benchmarks for both the reading and writing and math sections of the exam, according to the College Board, which manages the college admissions exam.
More than 1.3 million students in the class of 2026 earned scores aligning with or exceeding their high school GPA. This included 82% of Black and Latino students, almost 80% of first-generation students, and more than 81% of students from small towns and rural communities. Those trends had stayed steady over the past few years, the College Board said.
In 2024, the College Board debuted a shorter, online version of the SAT that was just over two hours, compared to three hours for the former paper and pencil test. The updated exam has shorter passages for the reading and writing sections, and students are allowed to bring their own non-computer algebra system calculator.
A research brief by the College Board published in July found that the shorter reading passages in the updated SAT did not meaningfully affect students' SAT performance on the reading and writing questions. The digital reading and writing section includes 54 passages of 25 to 150 words each, compared to the nine reading passages of 400 to 750 words in the previous paper and pencil SAT’s evidence-based reading and writing section.
Performance on the College Board's PSAT-related assessments for younger students increased slightly in 2025-26, after three consecutive years of score declines.
SAT participation overall fell slightly for the class of 2026. About 1.95 million students in the class of 2026 took the SAT, a dip of 2.5% compared to the class of 2025. This marked the first decrease in participation since just 1.5 million students in the class of 2021 — those affected by COVID-19 testing disruptions — took the SAT.
ACT, the other major standardized college admissions test, plans to release its class of 2026 data next month.
