The people behind the ACT, a standardized college admissions exam, announced on Tuesday that students will be given the opportunity to retake individual sections of the exam. Until now, students have been required to retake the entirety of the exam in order to improve scores, even if their goal is only to raise a single section’s score.
The ACT consists of exams in english, reading, math, science and an optional writing section. All of the tests are graded and converted to a scale from 1 to 36, other than writing, which has its own separate scale.
The scores were previously averaged based only on a single exam sitting, but this new policy allows students to “superscore,” meaning they can submit an average of each section’s highest score regardless of if they were all taken at once.
The entire exam system disadvantages certain people from succeeding by imposing strict time limits and only testing a limited realm of knowledge, rather than the comprehensive aptitude it claims to measure. Adding the option to retake single sections after taking the entire exam first provides an obvious leg up for those that can afford to take individual subject exams repeatedly.
Without this system of superscoring, students retaking the exam still need to show just as much skill in the areas they don’t want to improve as much in, because they must maintain their overall average. In this new program, students can focus their energies on one subject at a time and those with more money for tutoring and exam fees are at an advantage.
Most of standardized test-taking is truly about how quickly one can complete questions or answer a very specific style of questions, so students with more resources will pay for tutors to give them test-taking strategies and outline what they need to do to succeed in the exam.
Many public schools attempt ACT prep through grammar review in English classes and geometry review in math classes, but this does not compare to receiving tutoring from people trained to teach the specific content and testing style of the ACT.
If public universities require these exam scores for application and enrollment as they often do, it should not even cost money to take them in the first place and if they are to accept individual section retake scores with equal weight, the government should subsidize those exams as well.
Otherwise, universities are ignoring outside factors that make “standardized tests” highly unstandardized and inadvertently favoring students with more wealth. In an exam structure that gives many students testing anxiety and pushes their mental stamina to its limits, many students need help and if they don’t have the funds to get it, they won’t.
When allowed to retake individual sections, students can spend weeks studying only for a math exam, take it, and move on to science or english until the next subject exam. But taking all of them individually will be expensive.
Although ACT has not revealed how much the individual tests will cost, we can predict that they combined total of four separate exams will be greater than the price of one entire ACT. And individual subject tutors over a long period of time are undoubtedly more expensive than a few ACT review sessions.
Some universities have acknowledged the inequity in standardized testing and revoked their requirement that all applicants submit a score. But unless they have a system in place in order to not prioritize those that have taken standardized exams, which is unlikely, this only furthers the issue it is attempting to address.
If a student has a good score on an ACT but the rest of their application is comparable to someone that opted out of taking an exam, why wouldn’t the school choose an applicant that will raise their average accepted exam score?
Whether purposely or not, the institution of standardized testing favors economically advantaged students and provides unnecessary testing anxiety and stress for exams that have taken over the college admissions process but are meant to be a small piece of a much, much bigger puzzle.
Standardized testing should not be a business. It was created as a tool to measure college readiness and certain aptitudes, but through inequitable testing conditions and opportunities, has become highly profitable yet ineffective.
Splitting the exam up only furthers the disadvantages students face and that many schools acknowledge through test-optional policies. If the ACT wants to do what it claims to, it cannot allow individual section exams unless that is the only way the exam is offered. Otherwise, the test is measuring money and resources, not aptitude.
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