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The tide has been turning against standardized testing for a while now and the ACT’s recent decision to postpone “section retesting” again seems another proof point supporting the trend. If you remember, back in 2019, the ACT announced that they would allow students to take any single section (or combination of sections) on any given test date. Not satisfied with your Science section? Just retake that single section and add it to the concurrently announced concept of the ACT Superscore. The original refusal of certain colleges to superscore the ACT on their own seemed to be at the heart of this decision, as the ACT lost market share to the SAT, which was typically permitted to be superscored. And the benefit of extra revenue for the ACT based on more testing? That was the cherry on top.
But while superscoring did finally make it to the ACT (at least in theory), the concept of retesting never did and now will have to wait at least another year. However, a careful reading of the organization’s statement leaves room for interpretation on whether it will ever happen (the highlights are ours):
“After extensive consideration of how best to serve all learners, ACT will not be rolling out section retesting in the 2021-2022 school year. We plan to use insights from our efforts to offer this feature as we enhance and innovate new product offerings. Though there are merits to this enhancement, we have renewed our commitment to provide students with as many opportunities as possible to take the full ACT test. COVID-19 solidified our commitment to be intentional and deliberate to ensure a bright future for ACT and the many stakeholders we serve. This decision supports those efforts.”
Our take on this statement is that section retesting is no longer a high priority for the ACT. Perhaps they believed that the demand to take a single section was not there, after all. Maybe superscoring was always the real prize, which was available even without the need for single section test days. Or maybe section retesting would have presented even more administrative overhead for an already beleaguered group of teachers asked to spend their Saturdays administering the standardized tests in their respective high schools.
But perhaps the biggest reason that section retesting has not taken hold is because those colleges that didn’t accept ACT superscores still won’t accept them. To our knowledge, the hold-out schools (including Harvard, Princeton, Brown, Yale and others) did not fully embrace the concept of ACT superscoring, let alone section retesting. Without support from these powerhouse brands, which the ACT did not bother to gain prior to their initial 2019 announcement, the initiative was bound to fail. Most students are only interested in increasing their score as it directly relates to how colleges feel about that score for the purpose of admissibility (and not for merit-aid decisions). If many elite schools don’t even accept ACT superscores, why bother?
Now, with the influence of standardized testing waning thanks to Covid, there is even less reason for the hold-out schools to care about the acceptance of ACT superscores. This may make section retesting an idea that never makes it to fruition.
