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A few weeks ago, a new class of nearly 800 students arrived at Wesleyan University to begin their first year. Wesleyan is consistently ranked as one of the nation’s top liberal-arts colleges, and admissions are competitive.

But those who have made it to the school’s leafy campus in Middletown, Conn., look pretty much like their newly minted peers at any other college in the U.S. The interesting difference is one that doesn’t show. Nearly one-third of Wesleyan’s incoming class was admitted without an SAT score. Last year, the school dropped its requirement that applicants submit a standardized-entrance-exam score, and hundreds of would-be Wesleyan students from a wide range of backgrounds took advantage of the option.

In abolishing the mandate, Wesleyan joined a growing cadre of selective schools that includes other recent defectors such as George Washington University and Wake Forest. Today, nearly 200 of the roughly 2,968 degree-granting four-year colleges in the U.S. no longer require the SAT or the ACT, while 600 more have diminished their role in the admission process, according to the antitesting organization Fair Test. Those ranks include not only elite and expensive colleges like Bates and Smith but also major state schools like the University of Arizona and regional campuses including Montclair State in New Jersey and Weber State in Utah.