ACT For All High Schoolers? Keep Your Pencils Sharp.

The North Carolina State Board of Education is making a bold push to get all students college-ready. The Board will vote next month on a plan that will require most North Carolina students to take the ACT college entrance exam before graduation.

Students in 8th and 10th grade will take the pre-test. All administrations will be paid for by the state.
The board has two reasons for wanting to require the national tests.

1. ACT scores will be used as a tool for measuring school effectiveness.
2. Low performing students can be identified and prepared to take the ACT Compass. The ACT Compass is a test that some community colleges use to place students in appropriate courses.

Some of the numbers for the plan are as follows:

• 80,000 high school juniors will take the ACT, at a cost of about $3 million,
• the eighth-grade pre-test will cost about $713,000 a year, and
• the 10th grade pre-test will cost about $850,000 per year.

The Board plans to ask legislature for the funds at the next legislative session.

Board Chairman Bill Harrison says that the ACT is a better predictor students' success in their first year in college than does the SAT. The SAT is an amplitude test whereas the ACT better measures what students have learned in their classrooms.

The state would continue its practice of paying for students who take the preliminary SAT, and would exempt 10th-graders who do well on the SAT or ACT from taking the ACT the next year with their classmates. The state would not pay for 10th-graders who take a college entrance exam.

Like any large scale plan, this one has its critics.

"The ACT and SAT exams are not generally used to diagnose problems," said Cheryl D. Blanco, vice president for special projects at the Southern Regional Education Board. "They're used for admission purposes and to find out whether [students] can do college work."

Course grades are better predictors of college success, Blanco said, which is why some colleges have de-emphasized standardized admissions exams or decided not to require them.

The amount of test preparation and savvy are other concerns, as it may unfairly advantage some students.

Students are still responsible for passing the existing battery of state mandated standardized tests. This means that the testing load will increase, as will class time that is parsed out for testing windows.