Virginia Commonwealth University will no longer require some applicants to submit SAT scores.
President Michael Rao announced Tuesday that the Richmond school no longer will require applicants with a high school grade point average of 3.3 or higher to submit SAT scores. He made the announcement during his annual state of the university.
Hundreds of universities around the country already have dropped the SAT requirement. At VCU, the SAT still will be required for some programs, such as engineering, and for some of the university's endowed scholarships.
Rao stressed that VCU "is not lowering its quality standards for students who are admitted, rather it is emphasizing GPA over SAT scores since the GPA has proven to be a better determinant of how well a student will do in college," according to a release from the school.
Rao also said that research has shown that the SAT has racial and socioeconomic biases, which is backed up by research by the school.
He called the reliance on SAT scores a "fundamentally flawed" system.
