Collegeboard sat12/16/2023 By 2012, 9 states paid for all juniors to take the ACT, compared with only one state signing a similar contract with the College Board.įor the College Board, making deals with states would help blunt ACT’s momentum and give the organization the opportunity to reestablish its dominance over the college admissions test market. The ACT had been the natural candidate because it has a more straightforward structure than the SAT and is perceived to test content knowledge, while the SAT is said to test a student’s aptitude for college with questions that aren’t tied to the courses they are taking in high school. States wanted to kill two birds with one stone by using tests that students were already taking as their accountability tests. The number of standardized tests that high schools had to offer because of increased state accountability efforts in the late 1990s and then federal requirements in No Child Left Behind created test exhaustion. Why would this be a selling point to states? And why would the College Board move in this direction? In other words, all high school juniors in those states would be required to take the exam, no matter what they planned to do after graduating. This alignment would mean that states could use the SAT as the high school accountability test that 11 graders are required to take. The new president and CEO had impressed the organization’s board with what he later described as his “beautiful vision” of overhauling the test by 2015 to align with the standards he co-wrote. As a replacement for Caperton, the former West Virginia governor who led the organization for 13 years, the College Board chose David Coleman, who had served as one of the lead writers of the Common Core Standards, the then-new K-12 education standards that 45 states initially adopted. To combat the threat to its role in the college admissions process, the College Board chose a new leader with a plan for ensuring that the SAT would once again be the predominant college admissions exam in the country. In making this decision, officials at many of these schools questioned whether college admissions tests, and especially the SAT, live up to their billing as an accurate measure for predicting whether a student will succeed in college. for the first time in the test’s history.Īt the same time, more and more colleges were beginning to adopt “test optional” admissions procedures, meaning that they were giving prospective students the option of submitting their SAT or ACT test scores or not. Even after increasing the number of test administrations for two consecutive years in an effort to protect its market share, the ACT surpassed the SAT that year as the most popular college entrance exam in the U.S. However, in the 2000s, the ACT began cutting into the SAT’s lead. Throughout its history, the SAT had been the most widely used college admissions exam with a comfortable margin between it and its closest competitor, the ACT. The College Board was at a crossroads in 2012 when its long-time leader Gaston Caperton stepped down.
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