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Harvard is mandating SATs again

Harvard made waves today after announcing that students applying for fall 2025 admission will once again need to take the SAT or ACT, joining Ivy League peers Yale, Dartmouth, and Brown.

In 2020, with test centers closed during the pandemic, many universities, including Harvard, waived standardized test requirements for applicants.

However, research has shown that standardized test scores are one of the best tools for identifying promising students who come from disadvantaged backgrounds, as they are less susceptible to biases than letters and essays. As the "return to testing" trend gains more momentum, it will be interesting to see if the rest of the Ivy League follows suit.

However, research has shown that standardized test scores are one of the best tools for identifying promising students who come from disadvantaged backgrounds, as they are less susceptible to biases than letters and essays. As the "return to testing" trend gains more momentum, it will be interesting to see if the rest of the Ivy League follows suit.

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Family in front of TV

Hollywood may have its best year at the box office since 2019, but streaming audiences are still obsessed with old content

Viewers are opting for catalog content over new shows and movies across (pretty much) every major streamer.

Tom Jones6/29/26
culture
Tom Jones

The BBC has become the world’s top news website... by collapsing a little less than its competition

Press Gazette just published its annual look at the biggest news sites in the world across all languages; for the most part, it doesn’t make for particularly pretty reading.

The journalism industry publication’s latest update, which is based on estimates provided by Similarweb for May, found that 37 of the world’s 50 most visited news sites saw their reach shrink. Press Gazette highlighted that American outlets have been hit particularly hard by declining Google traffic compared to European counterparts, owing to the platform’s AI features rolling out earlier in the US.

Even the BBC, having climbed the rankings from last year to top the 2026 chart — reportedly in part thanks to Similarweb’s decision to combine the “.co.uk” and “.com” versions of the URL, given that the sites redirect to each other depending on the user’s location — showed a 1.9% decline from last year.

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