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College Controversies this Month

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May was an unusually busy month in College Admissions news. Two major events related to the College Board created a flurry of emails in my inbox.

The first is one you’ve probably heard about: the new “Adversity Score.” The College Board would prefer you call it by it’s official name, the “Environmental Context Dashboard (ECD),” and touts this as one way for universities to see past the effect socioeconomic status has on standardized test scores. Amusingly, other departments at the College Board have been arguing for years that there is no measurable effect of socioeconomic privilege on test scores.

I tend to take a somewhat optimistic view of the ECD and hope that it really do what the PR people at the College Board claim it will do, i.e. help more underrepresented and first generation students get into the colleges that will help them develop their potential. Additionally, most universities already had some internal form of the ECD based on past applicants’ data and publicly available data. Regardless of your outlook on the ECD, it’s unlikely to affect students coming into the US from international schools.

The second major College Board-related news was related to the May 2019 SAT test administered internationally. The results on that test were so universally unexpected that tens of thousands of international test takers signed petitions to ask the College Board to revisit the scaling of that test. For many students who are looking toward Fall 2020 enrollment, this was their best chance to take the SAT and use it to create a target list of schools that meet their needs. The next time the test will be offered internationally will be in October 2019, rather down to the wire for many students counting on EA and ED applications.

So, what happened to make test-takers so upset? Essentially, too many people did too well. When the average number of errors is low, the scaled points deducted for wrong answers is more significant. For most SATs, if you miss one math question, you’re going to get either 790 or 800 on that section. If you miss two, you’ll get a 780 or 790. However, on the May 2019 international administration, if you missed one, you scored 780, and if you missed 2, you scored 760. Thus, even if your accuracy was higher than ever, your scaled result might have been lower than ever. Of the approximately 30 test results of students I know personally, only 2 were happy with the results of the May test, and the rest were pretty angry about how the scores came out. Nearly all of them plan to retake in October.

Amazingly, on the May US domestic test, news came out this morning that the College Board actually found a scoring error and gave ADDITIONAL points to those who had answered a specific question correctly, widening the gap even more between international and domestic testers in May.

This doesn’t mean a international student should take a trip to the US just to take the SAT, this same kind of skewed difficulty level might happen on the domestic test next time. It should remind you that the SAT, ACT and other standardized tests are not true measures of your capabilities, and can barely even claim to be standardized in a way that can meaningfully discriminate between testers. If you are interested in learning more about the problems with testing, and the colleges and universities that have come out against the use of test results in college admissions (including a list of test-optional universities), check out http://www.fairtest.org/

ACT Testing Internationally

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As you may have heard, the ACT is switching to an all electronic format for international testing in 2018-2019. This is to help prevent cheating and allow ACT to send out instant updates to tests if it becomes apparent that certain questions are being leaked at test centers early in the time zones where the test is being offered.

This change has meant that many international schools will no longer be offering the test on campus (there are stringent requirements about monitor size, hard wired computers, etc., that international schools with a preference for 1:1 laptops rather than desktops can’t accommodate). In most countries, this is having the result that ACT is contracting with testing centers to offer the test.

I, with many other international counselors was hesitant to recommend the ACT to students looking to test in the coming school year because of fear that there wouldn’t be enough seats in the local testing centers (our city has 2 centers, and typically only 11 seats in the room for testing)

However, ACT is going to offer the test 4 times at each testing location over each weekend that the test will be offered: Friday afternoon and evening, Saturday morning and afternoon. This could potentially increase the availabilty and make the number of spots for each testing weekend roughly equivalent to the previous offering.

I am not 100% sure if the number of available seats will be the same in any particular city, or, if, in fact, there will be a test center as convenient to you as the previous offering at your international school was, but I am slightly less nervous about the possibility of taking the ACT internationally this year.

I wouldn’t put much effort into studying for it until we see confirmation of which sites will be able to offer the test (estimated to be announced August 1), but if you were going to take both SAT and ACT, it looks like that may still be possible internationally in 2018-2019. Of course, if you’re planning to be in the US this fall anyway, you can still sign up for a paper or electronic test at any of the testing sites where it will be offered domestically and avoid any international test center concerns.