When the coronavirus shut down high schools, standardized tests vanished almost overnight. The disruption prompted more than 200 selective colleges to suspend—sometimes permanently—their SAT and ACT requirements. By late March, the certainty of the ritual was gone. 

This summer's racial-justice protests also reminded higher education to consider college-entrance requirements in their essential context: structural inequality. Now, college officials are at a moment of reckoning that could change the assessment industry and diminish its most-familiar products.

As college students and professors decide whether to head back to class, and as universities weigh how and whether to reopen, the coronavirus is already on campus.

A New York Times survey of every public four-year college in the country, as well as every private institution that competes in Division I sports or is a member of an elite group of research universities, revealed at least 6,600 cases tied to about 270 colleges over the course of the pandemic. And the new academic year has not even begun at most schools.