Many Oak Park and River Forest High School juniors will likely be headed back to school next week with uncertainty hovering. The complimentary ACT college entrance exam, which has been offered to most of the state’s high school juniors for more than 13 years, may not be administered this academic year due to the messy budget situation in Springfield.
The Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) has not been allocated any funding for students in the state to take the free ACT tests this year, so the burden of paying for the complimentary exams has fallen to individual school districts.
The lack of funding also coincides with the fact that ACT’s contract with the state expired in June, opening up an opportunity for the nonprofit organization’s rival, the for-profit College Board’s SAT exam, to expand its market share.
According to a July Chicago Tribune report, SAT won a contract to become Michigan’s go-to college entrance exam and is “making significant inroads into the Midwest, where the ACT has been popular.”
The Tribune notes that Illinois in recent years has paid upwards of $100 million to administer both the ACT college entrance exam and its precursor test for students in lower grades. Since 2001, more than 100,000 juniors in Illinois public schools have taken the annual exam.
In an emailed statement, Karin Sullivan, District 200’s director of communications, said if the state doesn’t provide the funding, the district plans to foot the $47,000 it will cost to deliver the ACT exam on March 15 to the school’s roughly 800 juniors.
If the state does provide funding — but for the SAT instead — district officials will be faced with two options. They will either administer the ACT at the district’s own expense; or they will administer the SAT, which is less familiar to OPRF students and has recently undergone revisions, at no cost to the district.
“Both of these options are under discussion, and no final decision has been made,” Sullivan noted.
For parents and students who may be worried about the prospects of a new, state-subsidized SAT test, there are a few possible upsides.
An ACT spokesman, Ed Colby, told the Tribune that the recently redesigned SAT “will look considerably more like the ACT,” which he said is a “testimony to the success of the format and design that the ACT has maintained since it was introduced more than 50 years ago.”
And according to a recent survey by the National Center for Fair and Open Testing (FairTest), two dozen colleges and universities have adopted “test-optional policies” since spring 2014.
“More than 850 accredited, bachelor-degree-granting schools now do not require all or many applicants to submit ACT or SAT scores.”
In July, the Washington Post released a list of more than 180 ranked colleges and universities that don’t require the scores. Knox College, DePaul University and Robert Morris University were among the ranked schools in Illinois with test-optional policies.
“This test-optional surge is a sharp rejection of the ‘new SAT’ and an embrace of better ways to evaluate applicants,” noted Bob Schaeffer, FairTest’s public education director, in a statement.
CONTACT: michael@oakpark.com