DALLAS (NewsNation Now) — Senior year of high school can be a challenge, especially during a pandemic.

Riley Connor is a high school student in Reno, Oklahoma. The straight-A senior is Student Council President, a National Honor Society member and plays for her school’s tennis and volleyball teams. She says college prep in the time of COVID-19 has been stressful.

“I also need to take the ACT and study for the ACT and a bunch of the schools went test-optional, so it’s kind of just like madness,” Connor said. “It’s just kind of throwing a wrench in everything that you were trying to do while you were in high school.”

Connor is not alone in feeling overwhelmed. Her superintendent Craig McVay said the pandemic has been enough on adults let alone teenagers on the cusp of graduating.

“Now if you put yourself in the body of a 17, 18-year-old child and you start thinking about all the pressure that’s on them normally…then you see the incredible stress that they’re having about ‘what am I going to be when I grow up?'” McVay said.

Hundreds of colleges across the country are now pivoting from traditional admissions prerequisites to account for the abnormal year students have had.

As for standardized tests, the College Board announced in January that it was discontinuing the subject tests and the optional essay section on the SAT.

On its website, the College Board is asking universities to be flexible with students in three ways: by extending the deadline and accepting scores as late as possible, by equally considering students for admission who are unable to test due to COVID-19, and by recognizing that some students may not have the opportunity to take the test more than once.

According to the nonprofit education news source, Edsurge, some 1,600 American colleges are now test-optional in the wake of COVID-19 compared with just over a thousand that were pre-pandemic.

Colleges like the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay have waived admission fees and are accepting a 102% increase in students.

Conner, who is in the thick of applying to schools, says it’s heartwarming to watch universities make the process easier, but she does wonder how the new processes affect her chance of standing out to her top choices.

“I definitely didn’t think about it hurting my chances until about a month and a half ago. And I was like wait, they’re letting in more kids and I thought my ACT was an edge and now it’s not. So the schools I was reaching for makes me a little more nervous,” Connor said.

Superintendent McVay says the new process is “forcing colleges to look at students as a whole rather than test scores.”