The Nebraska Department of Education wants to give all Nebraska high school juniors the ACT college admissions exam this year instead of a battery of statewide tests.
Both the ACT and the SAT submitted proposals to the education department, which is moving forward a year early with a new law that requires using an entrance exam in lieu of the state tests.
Several factors made the ACT the unanimous choice among educators who evaluated the two proposals, said Valorie Foy, the department’s director of assessment.
Cost was one factor: The one-year contract that the state board will vote on Friday would pay ACT $1.034 million to administer the test to about 22,000 high school juniors. That’s $31,000 less than the SAT proposal.
Another plus: The ACT tests students on their knowledge of English, math, reading, science and writing, content similar to the current statewide tests, Foy said.
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Inclusion of the writing test was important to the evaluators, she said.
State law requires that schools start using a college entrance exam by 2017 but state officials decided to move ahead a year early in part because of recurring problems with administering the state writing test online.
The state dropped the test, and writing assessment will be covered by a new state English Language Arts test for fourth- and eighth-graders.
State officials also liked that ACT will communicate with parents about the tests and will let schools choose whether to administer them online or with paper and pencil.
That’s important, Foy said, because some schools may not have enough computers available to give it to all juniors online. Statewide tests are administered online, but over a longer period of time, so it can be done with fewer computers.
The ACT already is far more common in Nebraska than the SAT. Eighty-eight percent of Nebraska’s 2016 high school graduates took the ACT compared to about 700 students who took the SAT.
Eight districts, including Lincoln Public Schools, have been giving the ACT to all juniors for the past five years as part of a state pilot and some other districts have decided on their own to do so.
One of the advantages is the possibility of encouraging students to go to college who might not otherwise have considered it. Another reason is that busy high school juniors have more reason to care about the ACT test, and therefore try harder.
Juniors’ persistently poor performance on the statewide tests have long worried officials, who believe part of the problem is that they see little value in the tests, which gauge school performance but have no bearing on students’ grades. Tests such as the ACT, on the other hand, can be used to get into college or to compete for scholarships.
One of the challenges of using a college entrance exam instead of statewide tests is that they may not align as closely with Nebraska’s academic standards.
Another point in ACT’s favor, Foy said, is that the company will measure how well the test aligns with those standards.
“That was important to Nebraska educators,†she said.
A survey of educators showed little support for adding supplemental questions to the ACT directly related to Nebraska standards, but if the test doesn’t follow state standards closely enough that’s a possibility, Foy said.
ACT also agreed to support the state in its efforts to get the U.S. Department of Education to accept the ACT results in lieu of state tests for accountability purposes under federal education law. Nebraska will be among several states seeking such approval.