Upcoming Changes with ACT

Anytime that there are changes announced related to the ACT or SAT they tend to be big news.  (Ok, well, at least big news for those of us who follow college admissions news regularly.)  Such was the case in the last few weeks when ACT announced that they will have changes coming beginning next September.

They are going to begin allowing students to do retakes in just particular subject areas.  So, once a student has taken the full ACT they will have the option of taking just a particular section that they struggled with rather than retaking the entire ACT over again.

This news excited a lot of people, but I have to tell you, unless lots of colleges change their current admissions policies, this is likely not a change that will make a huge difference for most of our students.  That is because most colleges do not superscore.  Superscoring is when colleges will take the highest scores for each subject area no matter the test date and average all of those together to come up with a composite "superscore."  At this point, most colleges elect to use the highest composite score from one test date.

The other aspect that I thought was particularly interesting is that the section specific retakes will only be allowed to be done at national test sites that administer the ACT online instead of through paper/ pencil.  With most of our students still having a preference of taking the test with the paper/ pencil format, I am also not sure how that shift will impact the decision to take just a particular section.

I am confident that in a few years these changes will be much more mainstream and chances are that for the current sophomores these changes might be applicable, but, I'd guess that before that it is big news that really won't have any applicability yet.

Here is an article that highlights these changes if you want to read more about it.