Maybe colleges aren’t using test scores to rank the students. Maybe they use them to see if the kids can do the work, and once they meet that bar they move on to other things in the app. You’re either college ready or you’re not. What difference does it make if you got the scores they’re looking for on the first try or the 3rd?
I would guess because college exams, as well as life after college doesn’t give you three tries.
“Not sure what schools you’re talking about but I’d like to know so that we avoid them. Why would any colleges want to weed out kids?”
Weed out has been going for decades, it tends to happen more in STEM majors at public colleges but happens in private colleges as well. As OHmom points out, one is for space reasons, the other is that colleges that graduate scientists, engineers or pre-med students actually want them to know their stuff. Anyway it’s not that relevant to this thread.
Also timed tests also happen in non-stem classes, a lot of tests in classes like Philosophy can be challenging to finish.
Taking an exam on a computer is not a big deal. CLEP exams are an example of standardized testing done that way. Kids practice on Khan that way. These students are used to working on computers.
I strongly disagree that the tight timing on the ACT reflects anything of value in terms of student success and ability… It rewards fast reading speed with 3 hr plus endurance. Not a real world success skill necessity.
My physicsgeek kid always crashed by the SR section. He is dyslexic but gifted and doesn’t need extra time for real life functioning. But by that last ACT section, his endurance was gone. It was always his lowest score and brought his composite down. Definitely not bc he didnt know how to answer the questions.
He graduated college with a 4.0. His ACT SR score reflected absolutely nothing other than he was burned out by the end of the exam. If he could have taken the SR section by itself, he would have scored a 36 on that section.
Being able to take a single section is a completely different test with different results. How the ACT is going to reconcile that with their “you can’t study for it for statistically significant score gains or you must be cheating” stance will be interesting to see.
@Knowsstuff My ds didnt find the timing for the GRE anywhere as tight as the ACT. It may be a nonissue for your student.
Is there not a risk of colleges unofficially finding the ACT to be less reliable and favoring the SAT? The number of students scoring 35-36 already spiked last year.
What I have not found anywhere is whether any college has already agreed to actually use test scores from the partial retakes that will begin next September. You have many colleges that do not even superscore. One might suspect at least some that superscore may accept partial tests in doing that but until a real list of such colleges exist, one would be hard-pressed to recommend that a student do a partial test.
Part of the announcement says that ACT will also start providing highest section score reports to colleges. That sounds like ACT might be doing away with one of its worst “greed” features – requiring a separate fee to send each test to colleges when the student has taken multiple tests. But that is not entirely clear and the suggestion may be that it intends to actually charge more fees because sending a superscore report is phrased as something the student can “choose” to do, and thus may have to pay an additonal fee to have it done…
ACT’s announcement claims that recent studies ACT has done indicate that superscoring does not diminish the ability of the test to predict how students will perform when they enter college, and that superscoring may actually be a better predictor. That means ACT has come 180 degrees from its position in the 1990s that superscoring diminished the tests accuracy in predicting potential success in first year of college. That position is what resulted in many colleges rejecting superscoring for ACT even though it was allowed for SAT. I wonder if ACT intends to provide the details of its recent studies publicly, or at least to colleges.
I also wonder about this…perhaps colleges won’t even accept single section retakes and/or the ACT provided already superscored composites…and/or maybe more schools just choose to go test optional.
I don’t know of any that have changed to TO based on this new ACT news yet, but just this year several selective schools have gone TO including Bucknell, Colorado College and RISD, as well as less selective schools like Marquette and Xavier. Will be interesting to see whether the UC system decides to go TO when they take it up in late winter/spring.
If anyone is interested in viewpoints of a college enrollment manager, Jon Boeckenstedt of Oregon State (formerly many years at DePaul) has a great twitter feed.
@Mwfan1921 Thanks for that twitter recommendation. He’s pretty straightforward with his thoughts on this!
“We may some day look back and point to this as the turning point, when everyone finally realized that the whole system is a sham, and that it’s just two private companies, accountable to no one, attempting to get a market-share leg up on the competition.”
Oof.
Lots of underserving kids get allocations for these tests. Perhaps this will level the field for everyone, especially those taking one section at a time.
Having said that. I will not be surprised if the curves for the students taking the single section test are brutal. Having more time fo a single section will help to correctly answer more questions. At the time, missing just a few questions might not necessarily yield the perceived result. Whatever, the trend will be, colleges will adjust their requirements.
In the past few years, many colleges have increased the requirements for automatic merit awards as more students are applying with higher scores. As an example, the University of South Carolina (do not super score) is now requiring a score of 29 to be able to award the same scholarship which only required a 27 just two or three years ago. For those schools that continued to super score, the scales will go up as well.
Also, there is an incredible disparity between what we constantly see in this forum vs the national averages when it comes to testing ( ACT score of 20). It is interesting to see that anything above a 33 basically translates to a 98 percentile of test-takers. Assuming 1.9 million took the test last year, it becomes a small number achieving those scores. These are the same students applying to the top 20-30 schools No wonder all these schools are competing for the same students.
The numbers do not change that much when looking at ACT scores of 28 and above. Again, not a lot of test-takers are able to achieve these scores which is pretty much the target for schools within the top 30-100 of the usual rankings.
I am just glad I am on my last go-around this year and this is will be behind me just a few months from now. It will be interesting to see how it all plays out, especially as the pool of college applicants continue to decrease in the years ahead.
Big changes are coming to the ACT this fall. Dave Berry breaks down the essentials: https://insights.collegeconfidential.com/new-options-for-act
So will the one and done or even two and done kids just stand out that much more? Will colleges use this against the students that are retaking sections to weed them out and deny them?
Unless colleges require all SAT and ACT test scores, how would they know who is a one and done? Will definitely be interesting to see what they do about section retakes and how/if it becomes part of the evaluation
It will be more interesting to see schools such as UGA which seems to put more weight ob the English and Math scores of the ACT
In real life, you don’t get to do everything multiple times. You don’t get to do things without time constraints or other restrictions. By allowing single-section tests, average scores will undoubtedly increase, perhaps even significantly, making the tests even less discriminating and useful. ACT, and College Board as well, are fighting for market share and revenue, trying to stay relevant. But what they’re doing will have the opposite effect, making them less relevant in the longer term.
@Mwfan1921. Thought some schools we applied to wanted to see all the scores. It’s been like 3-4 years now… Lol…
True in some sense. But in real life, very few people are in a vacuum in their jobs…they get to speak with people about their projects, get direction from bosses/coworkers, do research on the internet, work in a team environment, etc.
Taking a 3 hour exam designed to test what one has learned across several subjects does not have many parallels in the real world and daily life.
These tests further exacerbate the divide between the haves and the have-nots…those who are in better K-12 schools, as well as those who have the time, support system, and money to prepare for these tests have a huge advantage.
These tests are already less than meaningful for those reasons…roughly 30-40% of 4 year schools are test optional now, and I hope these ACT changes result in many more colleges choosing to go that route.
Definitely still a few of those left…who knows, maybe these changes will result in more schools requiring all scores!
it’ll be interesting how this affects (or not) auto scholarships for GPA/Test scores at some state schools.
Not unless the publications that do the rankings stop using test scores as a factor. High average test scores benefit the college in many ways, as the system stands now.
There are two opposing forces at work. FairTest on one side, promoting test-optional and test-free admissions, and CollegeBoard/ACT on the other, promoting multiple-test admissions options.
By the way, you can donate to any of these organizations (but in very different ways 
)
It will be interesting to see where we are in this battle 10 years from now.