ACT STATE MANDATED March 2014

Parent Cafe
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<p>I think states are also using the writing portion to prove out results for national education funding (NCLB, etc).</p>

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<p>^ It may well be. The Michigan state is also doing a major overhaul in the MEAP test throughout all different grades this year partly because of the NCLB requirement.</p>

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<p>FYI, there are currently 11 states that mandate the ACT, 13 that mandate the sophomore PLAN: <a href=“https://www.act.org/stateservices/”>https://www.act.org/stateservices/&lt;/a&gt;.
They have been adding one or two a year for several years now. KY is the most recent, NC the year before (something of an “east coast” break through for ACT). Curiously they have yet to have any funding in their home state of IA.</p>

<p>I believe they have been leveraging the “content based” nature of the ACT (vis-a-vis the “aptitude based” nature of the SAT), the continuing emergence of national core curriculum, and the increasing demand for standardized testing to increase their market share. They have been able to map their tests to core standards and represent it as instrument appropriate for outcome evaluation. The strategy has, in my opinion, been successful as they have been able to surpass the SAT in “popularity” in the last three years.</p>

<p>This is one reason percentile distribution comparisons between the SAT and the ACT are invalid. The pool of subjects is markedly different for each test–many students who would never take an SAT take an ACT as a result of state mandates and so the 50th %tile, for example, ought not be expected to be equivalent across the two tests. It is also, IMO, part of the motivation for the pending revision of the SAT towards a “content based” approach.</p>

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<p>SAT is trying to take a market share in mandated standardized test.
<a href=“http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/02/08/college-board-markets-midweek-sat-testing-to-schools/?wprss=rss_national”>http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/02/08/college-board-markets-midweek-sat-testing-to-schools/?wprss=rss_national&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;