ACT Now & Then

Parts I & II

Michael Coulehan

Part I:

COMPASS/ESL Internet Version Helps Colleges Point Students in the Right Direction

COMPASS®/ESL is a comprehensive, computer-adaptive testing system that helps place students into appropriate courses and maximizes the information postsecondary schools need to ensure student success. It measures the students’ skills in reading, writing, mathematics, and English as a Second Language (ESL) and diagnoses specific skill deficiencies for remedial work. Then it provides fast, accurate results to help the college make the right course placement decisions. The system also includes e-Write, an electronically scored direct writing assessment that provides results in seconds, and 26 diagnostic tests in the areas of math, reading, and writing skills. Last year, more than 1,000 colleges used it to assess 1.2 million students. This year, a new Internet version will offer colleges more capabilities.

The people who develop COMPASS® believe in their product. It is all about a success-planning philosophy. COMPASS helps students find their way, and colleges succeed when individual students succeed.

The newest version of COMPASS/ESL brings the power of the Internet to local and distance testing programs. In addition to its long-standing features, COMPASS/ESL for the Internet will allow colleges to:

• Test students in remote locations
• Customize the messages that students see on their score reports
• Conduct outreach programs in feeder high schools to help prepare students appropriately for college-level work
• Test students at multiple sites
• Use data more effectively through improved database and reporting capabilities
• Automatically direct students whose writing scores fall into specified ranges to the e-Write evaluation for further assessment

Additionally, administrative tasks are simplified because the system:

• Delivers immediate student score reports
  
• Allows online ordering of testing units
  
• Provides automatic data collection
  
• Includes state-of-the art security features, such as a locked-down browser to prevent unauthorized exits from the tests
  
• Allows data to be viewed across testing centers and campus systems so student information is accessible
  

The Internet version also lowers on-campus technical support requirements, even as ACT extends its technical support to 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

They have more capabilities at the same price.

The two versions of COMPASS/ESL—one for the Internet and one for Microsoft Windows®-based networks—test students comparably. Schools may choose to use both versions. The Windows version might still be used in a computer lab or testing center, for example, while the Internet version would allow a college to test a newly accepted student three states away before she arrives on campus. The data from any Windows-version administrations of COMPASS/ESL can be imported to the Internet-version database to maintain one complete dataset for the college.

It makes everybody happy. The college can enroll the new student in appropriate classes in a timely manner, and the student can go to a location near home to test rather than spend a lot of money to travel to a campus just for placement purposes.

No matter where students physically take the test, they log into the version that has been customized by their own schools, so they see the messages pertinent to their campuses and their programs.

The score report is vital. That is where you get the very best messages in front of the students.

Customizable score reports are particularly useful in colleges’ outreach efforts. Eighty percent of the schools that use COMPASS/ESL are community colleges. Because they almost invariably draw most of their students from their own areas, they are able to develop customized outreach programs to their local high schools. With COMPASS/ESL for the Internet, they can establish a remote testing center in a high school and tailor the messages that students see on their score reports to help them make wise course selections while they are still in high school.

Basically the outreach programs help the high schoolers be ready for the college’s coursework when they get there, and eliminate some of the need for remedial work, which, again, makes for a more successful student and a more successful college.

Outreach programs are made possible by the new feature that allows a college to establish any number of test centers. No longer constrained by the reach of a local area network, any site with Internet access can become a testing center.

All of a school’s data are stored on ACT’s secure servers, so the dataset for all its test-takers is always complete and available for research or outreach efforts, no matter how many separate testing locations a school operates. The software offers several standard reports, or colleges may export data to another database program for further manipulation. In this way, schools can target specific students with opportunities that might benefit them. They might prepare a mailing to inform students with low-end reading skills of a special reading workshop, for example.

In some cases, COMPASS/ESL scores indicate skill deficiencies that require further investigation right away. As has always been the case, such students can take the COMPASS/ESL diagnostic assessments, which help educators and students zero in on specific skills that need more work. A student with a low general reading score, for example, might then take the reading diagnostic test to recognize a weakness in inferring the meanings of words. Then the report can direct the student to specific resources on campus to build that skill.

Colleges have always had the option of requiring their students to take the e-Write COMPASS/ESL test, although it was an either/or proposition—either all of their students took the directed writing assessment or none of them did. The new Internet version of COMPASS/ESL allows schools to designate a range of scores within which test-takers are automatically directed to the e-Write assessment for further evaluation of their skills.

With looming budget cuts and the current state of higher education budgets, ACT and the Foundation for California Community Colleges recently entered into an agreement which saves California Community Colleges money. The consortium agreement allows California Community Colleges to purchase ASSET and COMPASS/ESL materials at a volume price discount. Example of discounts:

The upcoming ordering period is 6/30/04-8/26/04. For more information visit the Foundation for California Community Colleges website at http://msca.foundationccc.org/compass-order.asp

For more information about the COMPASS/ESL Internet version, simply go to www.act.org/compass and, of course, feel free to contact me, your local ACT representative in Rancho Cordova, Ca at (916) 631-9200.

Part II:

A Corporate History

ACT has a history of providing professional expertise and service to colleges. Founded in 1959, it is an independent, not-for-profit organization that provides more than a hundred assessment, research, information, and program management services in the broad areas of education and workforce development. Though designed to meet a wide array of needs, all ACT programs and services have one guiding purpose: to help people achieve education and career goals by providing information for life's transitions.

November 7, 1959.

A senator named Kennedy was thinking of running for president. Rooms in good New York hotels went for $9 a night. A hamburger and fries at a diner cost 75 cents. Movie star Victor McLaglen died, the movie Ben Hur was about to open, and the nation’s top song was Bobby Darin’s “Mack the Knife.” In New York City, police posing as “beatniks” capped a months-long undercover operation—during which they had grown long beards and read their own poems in coffee houses—with the arrest of twelve Greenwich Village residents on marijuana charges. And on November 7, 1959, 75,406 high school students took the first ACT Assessment ever.

The founding of The American College Testing Program reflected widespread changes in American society and the nation’s educational needs. Before World War II, we were still a country in which only the elite attended college. Entrance exams—the SATs, for example—had a single purpose: to help colleges select academically outstanding students and reject the rest. Most high school graduates never set foot in an institution of higher learning.

This situation began to change with the close of World War II. Millions of veterans returned from Europe and Asia, and many took advantage of new financial aid programs to attend college. In the postwar economic boom, additional millions of men and women set their sights on college. Americans began to feel that a college education should be available to as many young people as could benefit from it. By the mid-1950s, most young people would continue their education beyond high school.

Society was growing more fluid: more people owned cars, jetliners and improved highways made it easier to attend college far from home, and federal programs like the GI Bill eased the financial barriers. Soon after Russia launched Sputnik, the world’s first space satellite, Congress passed the National Defense Education Act, making it still easier for working-class and middle-class Americans to get a college education. By 1959, colleges and university enrollments were double those of a decade before, and they were projected to double again by 1970. “An onrushing tidal wave of students is due to break upon college shores,” as ACT’s first annual report put it.

The nation’s colleges found themselves facing a diverse and growing student population. Many public universities were legally required to admit all in-state students who met certain minimum requirements—and there were thousands of such students. At the same time, the schools were also inundated by applicants from out of state. They desperately needed good information for making admission and placement decisions. They needed answers to basic questions: What characterizes these students? What academic skills do they have? Are they likely to succeed here? Are our courses appropriate to their academic skills? How can we equitably appraise the credentials of students from so many different high schools in so many different states?

To answer these questions, most universities offered on-campus testing each fall. But these tests didn’t allow enough lead time to serve the needs they were intended to fill. And developing, administering, and scoring the tests were expensive and time-consuming tasks. Statewide standardized tests were helpful, but didn’t provide information about out-of-state students. The SATs, which had been around since the early years of the century, were geared to elite private schools. They identified highly skilled students, but were of little use to the vast majority of colleges that needed to make accurate admission and placement decisions for students with a wide range of abilities. The American College Testing Program was established to help meet these needs. Now known as the ACT Assessment, it replaced a hodgepodge of testing methods developed by states and individual institutions, providing a standardized set of information about students seeking to enter college.

To understand ACT, it’s necessary to know a little about its co-founder, E. F. Lindquist. An educator, leader in the field of standardized testing, and engineer, Lindquist was an assistant professor of education at the University of Iowa in 1928 when he originated a program called the Iowa Brain Derby. The Derby was a statewide scholastic contest that mirrored the state’s athletic meets but was designed to identify academically gifted teens. Almost as soon as he had created the program, however, Lindquist decided that it emphasized the wrong issues. What was needed, he felt, was not a highly competitive test measuring rote learning, but a way to assess students’ knowledge and their ability to use that knowledge creatively. In the 1930s, Lindquist developed the Iowa Every Pupil Test of Basic Skills (ITBS), still one of the nation’s premiere assessments for the grade school years. This was followed by the Iowa Tests of Educational Development (ITED), an assessment for grades 9–12.

In their early days, the ITBS and ITED tests were scored by hand—a slow and tedious process. Lindquist soon saw the folly of continuing to try to score millions of tests by hand. So he tore down an old mimeograph machine to learn how paper could be moved through a machine. Then he figured out how to make a machine “read” a score sheet. The result was the “Mark I”—a scoring machine that was the marvel of the educational testing world in the 1950s.

“Lindquist’s development of the electronic scoring machine, and his quick perception of how to link this with existing computer capabilities, made possible the mass scoring of assessments by the mid-1950s,” according to famed educator and long-time ACT Trustee Ralph Tyler.

With the ITBS and ITED programs firmly established, Lindquist turned his attention to the needs of colleges. He was a member of the SAT committee of the College Entrance Examination Board, and in 1958 he urged the board to develop a new exam to meet the new needs of colleges. He defined his goals for an exam that would test broad competencies, rather than rote memorization, and encourage students to acquire knowledge and learn how to use it creatively. Unlike the SAT, it would test mastery of the curriculum actually taught in the typical high school and require students to do the same kinds of complex reasoning and problem solving they would have to do later, both in and out of college. “Lindquist’s greatest concern was . . . devising tests to gauge the educational development of each student for purposes of guidance and counseling as well as for college admission and placement,” recalled Tyler.

In 1959, Lindquist decided to realize his dream of a new kind of test and founded The American College Testing Program. His co-founder was Ted McCarrel, Dean of Admissions and Registrar at The University of Iowa. A personable man, widely known in the education community, McCarrel had professional contacts with educators in the midwest and around the country. His “networking” was instrumental in the immediate, widespread adoption of ACT’s first offering—the ACT Assessment.

The first ACT Assessment was administered in the fall of 1959. During the 1959-60 testing cycle, about 133,000 students paid $3.00 each to take the test. Today, nearly 2 million ACT Assessments are administered annually. In the years since ACT was founded, our flagship assessment has been administered to more than 40 million young people in 50 different countries.

ACT’s history is one of steadily broadening scope. With each new decade, we have taken on new tasks and responsibilities to meet emerging needs.

• Through the 1960s, we continually refined and improved our programs and services for four-year colleges. We also began to develop financial aid services for students and institutions.
  
  
• In the 1970s, we created new programs to help America’s growing numbers of two-year colleges and their students, and began to serve professional organizations.
  
  
• Starting in the 1980s, we extended our mission to serve the middle school and high school years.
  
  
• And throughout the 1990s and into the twenty-first century, we have built programs to meet the pressing need for a well-trained workforce.
  

Sidebar - A Tradition of Technology Innovation

In the early 1950s, E. F. Lindquist invented a machine that could score answer sheets automatically—and with amazing speed. This was a real departure. Before the machine, the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills hired dozens of women to hand score answer sheets each testing season. Now, a single machine took one week to perform tasks it had taken sixty women nearly six weeks to complete.

Lindquist’s first scoring device took up substantial space in a dilapidated building near the University of Iowa campus. Next to the machine was a kind of “clothesline” on which answer sheets were occasionally hung out to dry—the machine wouldn’t feed properly if the paper was too damp! It was a far cry from today’s sophisticated computers, but in its day, the Mark I, as Lindquist called it, was the marvel of the educational testing world.

In comparison with the first scoring machine, the technologies ACT uses today are positively astonishing. But these advances are good only insofar as they serve people. Lindquist’s greatest fear was that technological advances in testing might be used to exclude people from, rather than helping them participate in, the good things America has to offer. Like him, we are keenly aware that technology is simply a tool. We have chosen to use it to improve the ways we gather, analyze, and communicate useful information.

Since its founding, ACT has constantly adapted to emerging technologies and used them to meet human needs. Today, nearly every staff member has a desktop computer, and traveling staff carry laptops wherever they go. We have e-mail, voice mail, a comprehensive corporate website, videoconferencing, and a host of other high-tech resources. Many tests are being delivered by computer, and even essay tests can now be scored electronically. And in our everyday work, we rely on ACT*NET, our high-speed, multi-protocol network that comprises Microsoft Windows NT and Novell Servers, IBM RS6000 machines, Windows 95/NT/2000 desktops, and Macintosh machines. The ACT Learning Management System (ALMS) supports operation of our national network of ACT Centers.

In the twenty-first century, new technologies will probably make today’s electronics seem as quaint as the IBM cards and Bakelite telephones of the 1950s. And we intend that ACT will still be a leader in the use of new technologies, as we continue to provide people.