Both the ACT and the SAT have designs on testing kids who are years away from thinking about a college-entrance exam. The implications of these changes are significant for students of all ages. Starting in 2016, all Michigan high school students will take the SAT as a required state assessment exam. And it has already won one convert: the state of Michigan, which had been offering the ACT. The new test, which arrives in March, has schools, students, parents and test-prep companies all scrambling to anticipate the changes. Under the leadership of its president, David Coleman–an architect of the controversial Common Core standards–the College Board is about to launch a massively overhauled SAT that will compete head-on with the ACT for state contracts. The ACT, which was originally known as the American College Testing Program, has signed nearly 20 of these contracts in the past 15 years, part of the reason the ACT surpassed the SAT in 2012 as the most popular college-admission test in the U.S. These contracts benefit families by having taxpayers fund a college-admission test–but states are buying into the concept because the exams do double duty as assessment tests required of public schools. The organizations behind the SAT and the ACT are now locked in a battle for lucrative state-funded contracts to offer the tests to public high school students. Yet in a little-noticed shift, even as the tests’ sway over college admissions has waned, they are looming ever larger on the K-12 education landscape. “People with the very highest test scores coming into Harvard do a little better than those with the lowest test scores, but they don’t do a lot better.” “People make too much of test-score differences,” says William Fitzsimmons, Harvard’s dean of admissions. One reason for the change is a belief among some administrators that the tests’ predictive power for college success is overrated. 3, its relevance–and that of its Midwestern cousin, the ACT–is fading at many schools, including some of the nation’s most selective. 2 pencils for the SAT’s first fall sitting on Oct. Yet even as a new crop of high school students sharpen their No. Those ranks include not only elite and expensive colleges like Bates and Smith but also major state schools like the University of Arizona and regional campuses including Montclair State in New Jersey and Weber State in Utah.Ĭollege without the SAT? For generations of American graduates who will never forget the anxiety around that all-important Scholastic Aptitude Test and the quest to achieve the “perfect” score of 1600 (or, since a 2005 update, 2400), the idea might sound hard to believe. no longer require the SAT or the ACT, while 600 more have diminished their role in the admission process, according to the antitesting organization Fair Test. Today, nearly 200 of the roughly 2,968 degree-granting four-year colleges in the U.S.
In abolishing the mandate, Wesleyan joined a growing cadre of selective schools that includes other recent defectors such as George Washington University and Wake Forest.
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