How the New ACT Rules Affects the College Entrance Strategy
Hold on parents- there’s a new ACT in town. With changing views on the ifs and the hows of standard testing properly evaluating college readiness in students, the ACT has taken initiative to change its college entrance exam’s structure. However, for most high school students this comes at a time when they’ve already fleshed out a full strategy for test day. The most important question now becomes: How do the new changes change the testers’ strategies or should they even change their plans at all?
What Are the ACT Changes?
The Times is reporting that the ACT will have some changes as of 2020. The most important change will be the ability to retake sections of the test at a given sitting, rather than retaking the entire 3-hour test. Also, reporting of the score will include a “superscore” that only shows the highest score received for each subsection of the exam.
One other change to the ACT is that students will be able to take the exam online at its testing centers. The main advantage for students who opt for the online exam is that they will only have a wait of two business days to get their scores. Those who take the paper and pencil version must wait for two to eight weeks to receive their scores.
Still Focus on Improving Weaknesses
The most important help for many students created by the ACT changes is the fact that they can focus upon their weaker subjects, rather than having to take the entire test when some sections received good scores.
Reading, mathematics, science, English and writing are the five subsections of the ACT examination.
For example, the National Children’s Book and Literary Alliance reported that around 60 percent of high school students in any given year do not score at a proficient level on their National Assessment of Educational Progress reading testing. Thus, it is clear that reading would be a likely candidate for remediation by most college-bound high school students.
Still Consider if the Tester is Actually Ready for College
One must realize that the purpose of both the ACT and the SAT are to determine a student’s college readiness. As the NCBLA reported, the majority of our high school seniors are not proficient in their skills to read passages, make inferences and synthesize ideas between multiple texts.
Thus, many of the students who are taking the ACT are not ready for the demands of a college reading load. In fact, in an executive summary of ACT reading scores, the ACT found that 50 percent of the students who took the ACT in 2005 performed so poorly on the reading section, that they demonstrated they were not college ready in their reading ability.
The real issue for most students is not their scores and what colleges will accept them with, but rather that they need to improve their reading in order to be ready to actually succeed in college. This is one of the two major dirty little secrets in public education today.
The other secret in education today is that only 41 percent of our students are proficient in mathematics, so this might be another subsection where students need to get the services of a credentialed and competent tutor that can individually work with your child on the fundamentals of mathematics. Often, students are poor in fractions, which makes their algebra proficiency suffer. There are actually some students who never learned their multiplication tables, making any type of math very slow and cumbersome.
The great thing about the ability to retake subsections that received lower scores is that it will finally create a scenario in which students who have been struggling for years in their reading or mathematics will finally get the help they need.
Find Out the Admission Guidelines for the Target University
For the minority of our students taking the ACT, they may need to find out from their desired university if they will even consider superscores or if they will only look at the scores of full ACT exams. There is no use in taking a subsection if your desired university will not consider the score.
Conclusion
Overall, the greatest strategy change for college admissions by the new ACT exam rule changes is that students can now focus upon individual remediation of skills in order to become college ready. This is the great need of the majority of the students who attempt the ACT at least one time.