“We’re continuing to polish it, but not rebuild it,” Jon Erickson, president of ACT, based in Iowa City, Iowa, said in an interview.
Erickson said he’s hopeful that when students get the results and are able to interpret them, “it will be enlightening and, dare I may say, exciting.”
The ACT was taken last year by 1.8 million students and overtook the SAT in popularity in 2012. That’s in part because of growth in the number of states funding and requiring high school juniors to take the exam during the school day. Four new states — Minnesota, Missouri, Mississippi and Wisconsin — recently signed on to do so, bringing to 17 states participating at this level, according to ACT.
Last spring, the ACT said it would begin offering online testing and started piloting it this year.
Also on Friday, the ACT said it would begin making new open-ended questions available to districts in the subject areas of reading, math and science to offer to students as part of the school-day program. Unlike questions with fill-in-the-bubble responses, open-ended questions call for what the ACT describes as a “constructed response” by the student.
And it said it is working to develop language for 2016 that would explain what ACT scores mean as they relate to the Common Core standards being rolled out in most states. The Common Core standards spell out what math and language skills students should master at each grade level.
The ACT said that on June 14, a Saturday, just under 600,000 students are scheduled to take the exam — a record high.
-Kimberly Hefling, the Associated Press
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