It’s early on a Saturday morning and you are sitting in Cranbrook and Kingswood’s Keppel Gymnasium waiting for the proctor to tell you the rules for the exam. It’s your fourth time taking the ACT, and you are basically a pro by now.
Mom and Dad bought $300 of extra help for you and so far it’s paid off; your score has already gone up by three very valuable points.
As the timer starts, you know that in a few short hours, your future at a top university is pretty much guaranteed.
College entrance exam scores are one of the main criteria that universities use to decide whether or not the applicant gets an acceptance or rejection letter.
College admissions boards cannot tell the difference between a student who earns a 35 by studying on their own and another student who earns a 35 after taking a test prep class and having several hours of one-on-one tutoring. Essentially, if you have the money you can buy your way into the university of your dreams, and there is something fundamentally wrong with this statement.
Once a student and his or her parents condone spending large amounts of money on test preparation, they automatically have an unfair advantage over the competition. Whether or not a student is accepted to a college should be determined by how qualified they truly are, not how much parents are willing to spend to get their child accepted to an Ivy League school.
With something as important as ACT testing, it is essential that every student has an equal opportunity at doing his or her best.
In a survey taken by The Highlander of 75 Seaholm seniors, 42% said they had some sort of ACT tutoring or test prep either in the form of a one-on-one tutor or a class. In addition, 63 of the students surveyed said they took the test more than once.
This can become unfair for the students who cannot afford to have test preparation or take the test more than the one time offered by the state. While I certainly do not object to taking the exam more than once, scores can become misleading after taking the test three or four times after having substantial test preparation.
Since 84% of the seniors who took this survey are taking AP courses, the results of this survey cannot be generalized to the entire population of Seaholm seniors. This outcome may be a better representation of students who are enrolled in AP courses.
Still, it seems even more puzzling that so many students who are taking some of the most difficult classes that Seaholm offers need to have tutors to do as well as they would like on their college entrance exams.
For students who use substantial amounts of tutoring, their scores are a false indication of how well prepared they are for college. All of the additional test preparation inflates test scores, and thus, university admissions boards need to examine the scores in a different way.
For the Seaholm students applying to top universities such as Georgetown and Amherst, which both recommend that applicants have a 29-33 on the ACT, an inflated score can make a difference between being in the top 25% of applicants or the bottom 25%.
While studies done by the National Center for Fair and Open Testing have shown that success on a college entrance exam is not necessarily the best indicator of success at the college level, 830 accredited bachelor-degree granting institutions do not assess test scores as a part of the admissions process.
Regardless of the fact that ACT scores are found to only be predictive of freshman year grades in college, it is still a very important element in the admissions process. The ACT is used to test what students have learned in their past two to three years in high school.
While unnecessary tutoring is one of the main culprits of this growing problem, the greed of ACT non-profit organization is not helping matters.
In addition to the costs of tutoring, the cost to take the exam is not exactly cheap. To register for the ACT Plus Writing exam, which most colleges and universities require, it costs $47.00 for each test. Although the state of Michigan administers the test for free during the PLAN testing in early March, students may have already taken the exam more than once before this test date. It becomes unaffordable even if you’re just studying alone and taking the ACT three times, simply because the cost to test is ridiculously high.
Not only does the cost to take the exam hinder the ability of disadvantaged students to have an equal shot at doing well on the ACT, but the cost to send the score reports to colleges is also astronomically high. A separate fee of $9.00 per test per school is assessed. It is insane to have to pay that much to release test scores that are required by the admissions boards. For students who are applying to multiple universities, the cost of sending the score reports, combined with the additional testing and application fees makes even applying to college unaffordable.
And the greed doesn’t stop there. According to Americans for Testing Reform, the Iowa state Attorney General has recommended to the IRS that the ACT’s non-profit status be reviewed after finding that the CEO and Board of Directors may be over compensated. It seems peculiar that a company that claims to be non-profit had a gross profit of $38.3 million last year, and is able to compensate its CEO, Mr. Richard L. Ferguson, $630,918, which is 16.5 times that of other CEO’s in this industry.
Since there isn’t a ‘check here if you went to a tutor for you standardized testing’ box on college applications, what was meant to be a factor that leveled the playing field has turned into a money-making scheme, both for the ACT non-profit organization and the many test prep companies and tutors, which may or may not actually be predictive of success in the future. Although there is so much emphasis on testing, high school GPA is still considered the most predictive when it comes to gauging success in college.
While it may not be entirely the fault of overachieving students and parents, making the necessary significant changes to the college entrance exam process begins at home. Being admitted to college should be based solely on one thing; does this applicant meet the qualifications and standards our institution represents. If students didn’t get substantial tutoring, test scores would not be inflated, and would truthfully reflect qualification for admission.
