How ACT overtook SAT as the top college entrance exam
By Valerie Strauss
The ACT has for the first time overtaken the SAT as the most popular college admissions exam by a margin of a few thousand students.
Look at how things changed over time (information from FairTest):
1986: 730,000 students took the ACT compared with 1,000,748 who took the SAT.
1996: 924,663 took the ACT; 1,084,725 took the SAT.
2006: 1,206,455 took the ACT; 1,465,744 took the SAT.
2011: 1,623,112 took the ACT; 1,647,123* took the SAT
2012: 1,666,017 took the ACT; 1,664,479* took the SAT
* Once it saw that the number of ACT-takers had grown larger, based on a historically consistent measure, the College Board revised the 2010 SAT total upward by including more exam administrations, a practice it continued in 2011 and 2012.
So, how did this happen? Here’s the explanation from Bob Schaeffer, public education director of FairTest, the National Center for Fair & Open Testing, a nonprofit organization dedicated to ending the misuse of standardized tests.
1) The ACT is perceived as a more consumer-friendly exam by students.
* The ACT "writing" test is optional, so it takes less time (and money) if you are applying to the many schools that don't require a writing score.
* The ACT is scored with no deduction for wrong answers, eliminating the psychological hurdle of figuring out the best strategy to for avoiding the SAT's guessing penalty.
* The ACT has long had “score choice,” which has only recently been added by SAT, meaning one day's bad score does not become a permanent “scarlet number” on a college application.
* The ACT's content coverage is more familiar to many students — reading, math, English, science — compared with the less curriculum-linked SAT.
* The College Board's scoring errors, flaws and big executive salaries get far more media coverage than do the ACT’s because of decades of media fixation on the SAT. (FairTest typically gets 10 times as many media calls about the SAT as opposed to the ACT.)
2) ACT has shrewdly marketed its exam to many states as a replacement for (or supplement to) high school exit exams, arguing that adoption will reduce the number of tests a college-bound student must take while encouraging more teenagers to consider college. As a result, virtually 100 percent of students in nine states — including populous ones such as Illinois, Michigan and Colorado — automatically take the ACT with taxpayers footing the bill.
3) The College Board was very slow to adopt a similar marketing strategy, signing up only the less-populated state of Maine to require the SAT of all students. Case in point: North Carolina is about to include the ACT in its state assessment system, meaning that all high school students there must take it, even though the SAT has historically been the dominant college admissions test in that state.
Comments:
1. The observation that much of the growth for the ACT has been on the coasts rings true for me as areas like DC whose students were once only taking the SAT are now also embracing the ACT in abundance.
To the points well enumerated by Mr. Schaeffer of the reasons that many students have been drawn to the ACT, I would add that the ACT strikes many students as more straightforward--not necessarily easier--than the SAT. The ACT includes advanced topics such as trigonometry, logarithms, and matrices that are seen on SAT Subject Tests but not on the SAT, but the questions are seen as more straightforward. As a reasoning test, the SAT strikes many as “tricky” in ways they do not like, while the ACT seems as "learnable" as would any similar content in school.
Additionally, as more colleges allow students to forgo SAT Subject Tests if they take the ACT, some students perceive a path that allows them to take fewer tests and thus put all of their attention and effort into the one test.
Responds:
In response to the first two comments:
- Virtually every college in the country that still requires standardized admissions tests (875 do not -- see http://www.fairtest.org/university/optional) will take either ACT or SAT scores. They are viewed as essentially interchangeable.
- The ACT is not easier than the SAT, nor is it harder. It's not a better test or a worse one. It's just a different assessment product. Neither the ACT nor SAT is as accurate a predictor of college performance as are high school grades. Who says so? The test-makers' own research.
2. The ACT is a fairer test and allows more comprehensive skills measurement than the SAT - which has no reason - and has tricks and can be "gamed".
3. Given that both the ACT and the SAT are used as placement proxy tests, it is manifestly obvious that both tests are reliable indicators of college readiness. The colleges themselves say so in allowing them to be used as proxies. Fairtest as always is a bigoted bunch of idiocy.
Crimson Wife is correct, though. The explosion in the ACT happened after 2005, which is when the SAT changed. That's when more top tier students on the coasts began taking the test. That, and the increase in states requiring all students to take the ACt, account for the growth.
Responds:
Like so many other faith-based promoters of standardized tests, "Cal Lanier" offers not one iota of evidence to back up her rhetorical attacks on critics of high-stakes exams. Cal's argument that the use of the ACT and SAT as "placement proxy tests" (whatever that term means) proves they are "reliable indicators of college readiness" is the logical equivalent of the claim that the existence of poll taxes proved they were "reliable indicators of fitness to vote." Pure nonsense.
In 2005, 80 percent as many students took the ACT as the SAT. Certainly some of ACT's relatively faster growth in the past seven years reflects widespread frustration that the "new" SAT failed to address any of the major problems with the old test. But other factors were also at work including intense national publicity of the SAT scoring screw-up scandal and ACT's superior marketing (they convinced nine states to make taxpayers fund ACT administrations for all high school students)
Sorry, if facts get in the way of some posters' ideological blinders.
4. And here I thought that the grow out in the ACT numbers were simply because there are more and more midwesterners going on those colleges that require the ACT over the SAT these days.
Guess I'll have to run the numbers again and confirm. But my guess here is that it's the colleges choice, not the students.
Responds:
No, I think the big jump in ACT-taking has been on the coasts. I graduated H.S. in MA in '95 and nobody I knew took the ACT. Today, nearly all the juniors and seniors aiming for a selective college at my alma mater do. Then they send whichever they score better on to the colleges.
更多SAT资讯请访问》》》新东方网SAT频道
(责任编辑:许爽)