With the College Board overhauling the SAT in the middle of the class of 2017’s college entrance testing cycle, it is not unreasonable to expect that many students, who would under “normal” circumstances take just the SAT in the spring of 2016, will be taking the ACT only or both tests during that time.
In 2011, for the first time in standardized testing history, the ACT surpassed the SAT, albeit by a very thin margin of several thousand test-takers. The gap has been steadily widening ever since and is more substantial now. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/national/sat-vs-act/.)
This testing season will tip the balance in the ACT’s favor even further. And the trend will continue ever after… Not so fast, Bucko!
As a subscriber to Erica Meltzer’s blog, yesterday I found in my inbox a notification of her latest entry: “For what it’s worth.”
In that entry she has written just a short introduction; the long rest of the post is a remarkably insightful - crafted by a West Coast educator - analysis of the new development in the death match between these two gentle giants: the ACT, Inc. and the College Board.
Read it - and place your bets. Who will you be rooting for?
You really think it’s going to be a death match? There is certainly enough business out there to support both tests. And some students will always want an alternative to the one they perceive they don’t do well on. If ACT needs to they will probably reformulate their tests to differentiate themselves from the SAT again.
I haven’t looked at the data (e.g. from the last SAT changes in 2006 or before) but my guess is that it’ll probably stabilize, assuming CB gets their act together and if more good prep materials enter the market. A few years from now, people will probably forget that the SAT even changed.
I just hope that ACT will jump into this decade with their technology.
Yesterday I ordered all of my son’s ACTs, and had to re-enter my credit card info, school code, etc., three separate times for the same university application.
Notwithstanding my older son taking SATs once, we’ve only dealt with College Board in terms of SATII subject test.
The big reason ACT gained marketshare is its partnerships with state ed departments–many states made the ACT mandatory at their schools (thanks to sweetheart deals from the ACT). Surprise surprise, now the SAT is doing the same and has already re-captured at least a few states.
Let’s not confuse this with students’ “choice”–it’s the state mandatory testing policies (and deals with the testing companies) that is actually driving the shifts in marketshare.
Illinois, one of the largest ACT customer bases for the past 15 years, has just switched to a mandatory SAT. In 2015, the state’s graduating class had 157 thousand ACT takers and less than 6 thousand SAT takers.
In fact, now that I’ve read the linked article, I’m surprised Ms. Meltzer didn’t figure this out earlier; I thought it was pretty obvious. She also doesn’t follow the reasoning and evidence nearly far enough. Let me make this as straightforward as I can:
ALL of the big SAT changes the last few years have been in response to the ACT’s state contracts and ensuing growing marketshare.
SAT and ACT are competing for state contracts to make their tests mandatory for all public school students. That means they have to position themselves as achievement tests at the summit of state education systems, that they must be able to argue that their tests evaluate cumulative learning done in school. So if you’re in charge of the SAT, what do you do?
You bring in the former Common Core guy to head your re-design.
And you know that when you do win some state contracts, people are going to freak out because their kids have already been prepping for the ACT. So what do you do?
You make your redesigned test as similar to the ACT as possible–four answer choices, optional essay, no deduction penalty, predictable passage organization (narrative first), etc.
Boom, the dominoes start to fall and before you know it, states are jumping ship and you’re winning back those test-takers and that marketshare.
Oh, and since you’re a “non-profit,” you don’t pay taxes.
And what about recentering the curve to bring the lower scores up and to shift the median into the middle of the score scale? Don’t you think that is happening again to pander to the states? And what about SAT School Day?
Circa 2000, CB touted it had produced a “well-aligned” curve in which the mean=mean score= (about) the SAME score for both verbal and math=middle of the score range, and I notice that on the redesigned PSAT, the 50th percentile for users is around 480 for both verbal and math. However, the “college ready” mark is noticeably lower for Reading/Writing than for Math: 390 for Reading/Writing and 500 for Math. This score allegedly corresponds to a 75% chance of earning a C average the first year of college. Would there not be other combinations of Reading/Writing and Math scores that would also lead to a 75% chance of a C-average, say 500 in R/W and 390 in M, or 450 in both? Or is this just fudging the data so that more of certain populations turn out to be “college ready”?
Thanks for the link, @payn4ward. Meltzer’s article is indeed a good read, but I’m not convinced that the ACT is going to be “marginalized.” On the contrary, my impression is that students in many Asian countries, at least, are switching to the ACT in droves, precisely because the reading section is so “inferior.” Many Asian students who can barely break 1800 on the current SAT can score above 30 composite on their first ACT diagnostic test simply on the strength of the Math and Science, the relatively easy (compared to SAT Writing) English, and the silly, stupid Reading.
My impression has always been that colleges and universities don’t even pay attention to ACT Reading and the Science, which literally test almost nothing more than the speed with which a person can retrieve information verbatim from the text (not a terribly important skill for college, in my experience). That means they are making decisions based on the Math, which I guess is legit, and on the English, which is largely a test of elementary school punctuation rules (the difference between “its,” “it’s,” and the non-existent “its’,” for example).
@marvin100 's posts are also excellent. It’s stunning how many test prep experts persist in calling the ACT the “more popular” test. It may, in fact, be more popular–but the numbers are not an indication of student preference.
Another aspect is that there were major errors in scoring in December for ACT writing; before that, they changed the writing section in September with a totally changed scale, resulting in very “disappointing” results, especially for top scorers.
Also, the numbers are skewed by students who take both tests, who tend to be on both coasts (which used to be SAT-only.)
One more factor, @jgoggs - the ACT administrations suffer from exactly the kinds of vulnerabilities to cheating that the SAT used to suffer from before tightening up a bit a year or so ago.
Precisely. The answers aren’t even paraphrased from the text, they’re in the text verbatim. And the way the ACT makes the test “harder” is by increasing time pressure with non-sequential questions. The hunting may take time, but the finding is so easy.