Oregon’s public universities, including Oregon State University-Cascades, will no longer require SAT or ACT tests for incoming student applications, starting with students entering college in the fall of 2021.

The universities jointly announced this decision Wednesday morning, stating in a press release that high school grade point average, or GPA, is the most accurate predictor of a student’s future success in college.

Becky Johnson, vice president of OSU-Cascades, said the decision to make SAT and ACT tests optional will also promote equity. Students who attend better high schools or come from families that can afford test prep classes or books receive a huge advantage on the tests, she said.

“Sometimes, those standardized tests aren’t necessarily giving everyone a level playing field,” Johnson said.

Brittany Preston, OSU-Cascades’ director of admissions and recruitment, said aspiring first-generation college students often have a disadvantage on the SAT and ACT compared to students with college-educated parents.

“Their mom doesn’t know to tell them to take the SAT a second time to get a better score,” Preston said. “They don’t have that background to give that advice to the student, (and) that’s why I think you see some of those trends.”

A study from The Brookings Institution think tank showed that white and Asian students performed significantly higher on the math SAT test than black or Latino students in 2015.

“These gaps have a significant impact on life chances, and therefore on the transmission of inequality across generations,” the study, published in 2017, stated.

In December, a group of students, advocacy groups and the Compton Unified School District — where only 0.6% of students are white or Asian — sued the University of California system to stop it from using SAT and ACT scores in admissions, according to The New York Times.

Willamette University, a private university in Salem, already didn’t require SAT or ACT scores for applicants.

OSU and OSU-Cascades were already discussing making the SAT and ACT optional for admissions in recent months, Preston said. But with the spreading coronavirus closing schools and postponing SAT and ACT testing dates, the university accelerated its decision, she said.

“I hope the main message this sends to students is that we understand this is a very unusual time, and you’re probably stressed about a lot of things right now,” Preston said. “We wanted to remove one stress for you.”