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Since the first year I taught high school in 1990, students have regularly asked me about the SAT and ACT exams. The questions are usually about which exam they should take or how the exams are different. Watching both these exams adapt to the ever-changing college admissions landscape of almost 35 years requires that my response to those questions change accordingly. This latest announcement from ACT.org will require that I research and modify my responses once again.
Prior to the SAT going exclusively online, the adjustments to both exams typically did not affect the length or difficulty of the test material. There was the SAT update that got rid of vocabulary words that were only found on the exam and the realignment of the exam to mirror the PSAT but until the test was shortened and moved online, students didn’t have to change the way they prepared. Not to be outdone, the ACT organization offered the incentive or testing on individual sections of the exam for a few years so that students could concentrate all their attention exclusively to their most difficult subject instead of studying for all four subjects. Testing for individual sections has been suspended in part because super scoring has become more popular in the last few years.
These most recent changes in the administration of the ACT exam are obviously a direct response to the SAT exam going online. The SAT is shorter overall owing some of the time saved to a decrease in the length of the reading passages. Also, the online administration removes many steps that had to take place to send, administer and return test booklets. Security is easier to control as long as internet security certificates are kept up to date. If they were to keep pace with the SAT, ACT had to change.
Major criticisms of the ACT exam were very similar to those that prompted changes for the SAT exam. The length of the exam left students exhausted, the reading and English sections were too long and created time pressure for the student, and exclusive to the ACT exam, the science section didn’t really test science knowledge. The ACT organization has addressed all these complaints by following the SAT changes by making the reading portions of the exam shorter, giving the option of taking the exam without the science section and offering the option to take the exam online.
With change comes uncertainty. When either of these testing agencies make changes to their college entrance exams, there is an adjustment period. Colleges will not know how to respond to scores from the new exam until they see how the students perform on campus. That could be good news or bad news for early adopters of the new ACT exam. If the colleges accept the scores from the new test at face value, it will be good for testers who score well. If the colleges are wary of results from the new exam, testers will have to prove themselves in other ways. One thing is for sure. College admissions will continue to change and the testing organizations will continue to make adjustments to accommodate those changes.
