As a parent, I am delighted that there are test optional LACs out there which give significant merit awards and do not require test scores.
My younger one is a sweet kid, most rigorous curriculum, varsity captain, serious musician, blah blah – plenty of bells and whistles. But he stinks at standardized testing, whether because he panics or he needs more time just to process than the test allows. He’s more like me, slow and steady, than he is like my husband, who has a lightening quick mind (which the other son inherited). We need merit money because we do not qualify for financial aid, but cannot, like so many families, write a $60,000 check each year. Although my older one is flourishing in a public (and more affordable) flagship, this one clearly is a LAC kid, practically hyperventilates when he visits his brother at the 30,000+ sized campus. So we are grateful to schools like Knox, Lawrence, Beloit, Kalamazoo, Earlham – all of which award substantial merit (50% tuition or more) for kids like him, who contribute to campus life but whose test scores do not tell the whole picture. Those schools seem to do a pretty good job of identifying serious candidates for merit awards, without relying on test scores alone or in isolation.
Of course, a whole swath of schools don’t award merit aid at all, such as the NESCACs as well as Franklin & Marshall, Bard (complicated, but apparently linked to financial need) and some others. That meant those schools had to come off his list. The arms race that is college application season at his high school means that he loses credibility because he is not applying to uber schools, but we have all been practicing a variation of smile and nod for months.