If the American marketplace has exhibited one trend in the last two centuries, it is the emergence of two dominant forces competing for consumers’ dollars in any given market. Many of these names have become ubiquitous and even misnomers (asking for a Kleenex or making a Xerox) as brand awareness merges with product awareness.
High-stakes college admissions testing is no different. Colleges and universities in California and on the east coast require an SAT score as part of their admissions process, and with that comes a perceived degree of exclusivity or privilege, as some of the nation’s most revered (i.e. Ivy League) schools require the same.
The rest of us take the ACT.
Is there a difference? The blind taste test data says, “Not really.” Both the SAT and ACT are born from the same caliber of think tank; a large group of well-lettered, massively-experienced and diverse professionals devise an instrument to assess students’ readiness for college as comprehensively as possible. Both the ACT and SAT are re-normed periodically every few years to ensure rigor paces growth in curriculum. Colleges and universities will exact whatever standard they choose to either test to meet their admissions criteria. It would seem that the SAT’s 1400 is Coca-Cola to the Pepsi of a 32 on the ACT. The raw number of test takers lends itself to that idea; in 2013 1.8 million students took the ACT to the SAT’s 1.67 million.
As the majority of college-bound students in Illinois do not attend schools in California or on the east coast, familiarity with the ACT and its scoring system begins long before a student sits for the test as a (most often) junior in high school, while the SAT and its scoring system remains somewhat distant and fuzzy…akin to more obscure parts of the metric system. The State of Illinois knows this, and since 2001 in an effort to produce more college graduates in-state, the state paid for an ACT test for any public high school student who chose to take it.
This has been an enormous undertaking for the state; the class of 2014 yielded more test takers that year (2013) than any other state in the country. More than 158,000 students took the ACT in Illinois that year, while approximately 6,500 took the SAT.
The stakes in high-stakes testing in Illinois, as they are, were just raised. The State of Illinois’ contract with ACT as its college entrance exam provider expired on June 30, and has not been renewed. While the underlying cause of this lapse has much more to do with funding and less to do with preferring Coke to Pepsi, it has already created a large vacuum that gains more public attention by the day.
Illinois no longer endorses a college entrance exam.
There are as many implications to this as there are stakeholders. Should the state choose to remain neutral in the ACT v. SAT contest, paying for college entrance testing may once again fall to the parents (or at least the majority whose students needed to take the ACT) as it did prior to 2001.
For College Board, makers of the SAT, there lies an enormous opportunity to gain a stronger foothold in the Midwest. The State of Michigan recently signed a three-year contract to offer the SAT free to its public high school students, while the ACT is now an out-of-pocket expense. College Board, while headquartered in New York, has a large satellite office already in place in Chicago, and nationwide brand recognition for its advanced placement programs for grades 6-12. Public universities such as the University of Illinois are becoming rapidly “bilingual” in that they accept either ACT or SAT scores. But for as much as Illinois and its roughly 150,000 test-taking high school juniors are enticing to a would-be contract seeker, College Board will likely hear the same answer ACT heard at the end of June.
Illinois is fresh out of assessment dollars.
A recent Chicago Tribune article notes that roughly 60 of Illinois’ more affluent districts have stepped into this void and signed individual contracts with ACT. These moves will come at a great cost to these districts; Indian Prairie School District 204, which spans portions of Aurora and Naperville, will likely spend in excess of $100,000 in 2016 on the ACT for its students. It stands to reason other similar districts may follow in Indian Prairie’s footsteps; however the majority will not. Bound by a funding formula that generates 78% of a school district’s revenue through local property taxes, the large majority of school districts will be forced to pass the cost of college entrance testing all the way to the parents.
College entrance testing in Illinois may take a new shape, or revisit an era prior to 2001. In any case, well in excess of 100,000 students across the state will take one brand of college entrance exam or another in 2015-2016. As is the case with all high-stakes testing, rigor is the name of the game. The SAT was put through one of its cyclical re-norming updates for 2016; should Illinois move in that direction students will be faced with an even tougher test this year than last. Undoubtedly, ACT will follow suit on its own re-norming timeline.
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