STANFORD UNIVERSITY — Performance on standardized tests is strongly correlated with socioeconomic status and family background. That relationship, the panelists in Tuesday’s conversation, “Test Scores Optional: What It Means for Access to Higher Education,” largely agreed upon. But they also concluded that simply shifting to a test-optional admissions system — as many colleges and universities have done amid the COVID-19 pandemic — is not enough to combat the inequities ingrained in the college admissions process.The conversation, which was sponsored by the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society, began hours after Stanford announced that it will not require test scores for the 2021-2022 admissions cycle due to the continued challenges of COVID-19. But, according to Angel Pérez, the CEO of the National Association for College Admission Counseling, the test-optional shift was already gaining traction before the pandemic as standardized testing grew more controversial and as institutions began to consider their role in perpetuating systemic racism and inequity. Ana Rowena McCullough ’95 J.D. ’99, the co-founder and CEO of QuestBridge, a nonprofit organization focused on increasing access to the nation’s most selective institutions for low-income youth, has observed the impact of standardized testing on disadvantaged populations since she founded the program as an undergraduate in 1994. “What we saw was that the test score itself, at least in practice, didn’t seem to be an accurate measure of whether students were prepared or capable of thriving at some of the best colleges in the country,” she said.