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Monday, February 8, 2016

Why the SAT and ACT May Replace PARCC and Smarter Balanced | EdSurge News

Why the SAT and ACT May Replace PARCC and Smarter Balanced | EdSurge News:

Why the SAT and ACT May Replace PARCC and Smarter Balanced

Why the SAT and ACT May Replace PARCC and Smarter Balanced
Alice Barton

This March, the SAT will be getting its most significant makeover in 10 years. Testmakers hope the new focus on data analysis, reading comprehension and algebra—and thankfully, less emphasis on obscure vocabulary—can better predict students’ readiness for college.

State officials also hope that the test can do double duty and assess students’ competencies on Common Core and state academic standards, as well.

Already, the U.S. Department of Education has approved four states—Connecticut, Colorado Maine, and New Hampshire—to use the SAT as a high school assessment for federal accountability purposes. Delaware is on track to become the fifth. And that's just for accountability—in the 2015-2016 school year, the SAT will be administered to every public high school in Connecticut, Delaware, Idaho, Maine, Michigan, New Hampshire and the District of Columbia, as well as in more than 100 districts across 17 more states.

Another popular college exam—the ACT—is also throwing its hat into the ring as well. ACT reports that at the moment, 15 states will be administering the ACT to all 11th graders as a required statewide exam, and four others will be funding the ACT for all students on an optional basis.

For the creators of these tests, the window of opportunity swung open after Smarter Balanced and PARCC began falling out of favor with schools and districts. Just five years ago, these two testing consortia promised a new generation of assessments. Each received approximately $180 million in Race to the Top and American Reinvestment and Recovery Act funds to develop and administer exams that could test students on college and career readiness as dictated by the Common Core State Standards. At their heydays, 23 states signed up for Smarter Balanced, and PARCC was adopted by 23 states and the District of Columbia.

But these tests failed to live up to expectations. Teachers and students were puzzled at the absence of seemingly important test items. SR Education Associates’s Steven Rasmussen found SBAC to be “a quagmire of poor technological design, poor interaction design, and poor mathematics that hopelessly clouds the insights the tests might give us into students’ thinking.”

And over time, the two exams began losing contracts. As of today, only six states will administer the PARCC test in 2016. SmarterBalanced currently claims 18 members on its “member states” map, but that figure should be lower given Montana and Why the SAT and ACT May Replace PARCC and Smarter Balanced | EdSurge News: