@quietdesperation If this was about an individual’s dissatisfaction with his or her writing score, your comment might hold weight. Unfortunately, this is about a standardized testing organization’s BROKEN system.
How much money in merit scholarships do you think students around the world have lost out on because ACT’s scoring errors? All of the other sections are scored electronically, which takes any subjectivity out of the equation–but the writing scores are supposedly graded by living, breathing, humans. That means “trained readers” must must be sticking to a reliable, consistent formula for scoring writing tests, right?
Funny thing. Everyone who has ever worked at ACT seems to bemoan the organization’s “lack of training.”
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Here are some reviews posted on Indeed.com and GlassDoor.com by lovely ACT employees who have spent anywhere from several years to over a decade working at ACT’s Iowa City headquarters.
“Bloated management that doesn’t really care about your work, frequent technical issues, often unable to help customers. Low company morale.”
“Many of the employees showed up late and were very unprofessional, and there were things going on inside the company that broke rules as well as laws.”
"All of the workers know that you do not learn anything in training. In my case, I didn’t either. Training doesn’t prepare you for a regular day at work…
“Utterly dysfunctional leadership…nonprofit mission losing out to corporate mindset.”
“The working environment is a joke…Additional conflicts were created by the 3rd party data host - no one within ACT is capable of assisting with resolving issues created by this data host. Ultimately, you are being told you are the Primavera application owner but in reality have zero ownership powers…Any sort of attempts to deal with this groups’ deficiencies are met with hostility, even when done in private and in a professional manner.”
“Chaotic and bad management…They hire nothing but druggies and promote individuals to supervisors who have no clue as to what they are doing.”
“Boredom sets in after the first two days. Co-workers are inherently lazy and slow. It was not uncommon for several of them to not show up and the supervisors casually worked around that.”
“The hardest part of the job was being cross trained and being switched departments at any time of the day. Sometimes projects were long and tedious even pointless or not accurate due to times and dates.”
“Minimum wage is what you get, and for what you have to do, it is not worth the pay. Its the saying you give what you get and I didn’t push myself much because I didn’t feel it was worth it.”
“There is lack in communication within the whole company…Even with a college degree, they were barely paying me enough to survive. I had to even rely on other government support because my income at ACT was not enough.”
“Management is not supportive or service oriented, they care more about revenues and selling (or they call it “recommendation”), you can miss many days and be late just as long as your selling track record is in the top spot. If you do not make sales, they start giving you problems and are always on you. If a customer requests a supervisor, they will not come until you have tried everything and then maybe they will come but other than that, they completely ignore you.Co-workers are okay but they lie sometimes to get sales and management will not say anything to them.”
“ACT is a small company that got too big too fast. They weren’t ready for the extra work and staff and were forced to downsize areas that were consolidated, choosing to let full time employees go…”
AND MY PERSONAL FAVORITE:
“At first, I thought ACT was an awesome company to work for but then I learned how selfish executives were…There was never consistency throughout…this company sweeps corrupted information under the rug.”
Many of the comments also focus on the below-average compensation extended to employees and pressure placed on staff to sell, sell, sell more tests to kids. Did I mention another reviewer posted about “work-from-home options” being available to potential employees? Yeah, that’s really comforting. Your writing test could have been scored by an emotional chick in her 30s kicked back on the couch watching The United States of Tara and chugging boxed wine while sobbing over her boyfriend’s infidelity. There’s accuracy for you.
Yes, there is definitely something major to pursue here. I will keep you guys updated on what transpires.