Balancing Access and Success: Admissions Officers’ Sensemaking of Test-Optional Policies at Less-Selective Public Institutions

The COVID-19 pandemic pushed many institutions and higher education systems to adopt test-optional policies due to challenges accessing testing sites, expanding test-optional policies outside the traditional sphere of private liberal arts and highly selective institutions into public institutions that span from less to highly selective. As public system staff evaluate maintaining test-optional policies in the future, they must balance the needs of students, institutions, and the system. This multiple case study explores participants’ sensemaking, drawing upon interviews with admissions personnel at two public, less-selective institutions in the same state under a system-wide test-optional policy. Our findings suggest that participants’ sensemaking of the test-optional policy interacted with organizational factors to create nuanced views about maintaining the policy long term. Policymakers should account for the varied test-optional experiences at different institutions when deciding how to proceed with their test-optional policies.