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Last year, colleges waived the requirement of an ACT score in college admissions. This was due to the fact that the ACT was not widely accessible because of restrictions related to the coronavirus pandemic. Though the ACT can again be taken, many schools still do not require it or use it to determine scholarships.
“SUU officially went to a completely test optional institution,” said Ammon Harris, regional representative for Central and Southern Utah at Southern Utah University.
“So President Wyatt and Provost Anderson made the decision in response to the lack of test availability for students
(particularly outside the state of Utah). We are trying to do our part to break down barriers for students to access education and believe that this will help open the doors a little more to higher education.”
The change in ACT requirements assisted in increasing educational opportunities for students. As the requirement was lifted, college enrollment increased dramatically.
“The change has brought a massive influx of students. We at SUU saw an increase in enrollment of 14 percent during a worldwide pandemic,” Harris said, “the highest amount by percentage than any other institution in the state and potentially the country. We know it’s not only because of this change, but it has helped open the doors.”
Though this change has many positive factors, there is concern that students who had a higher ACT score and who took more challenging classes are now put at a disadvantage while those who had a lower score and took easier classes are benefited.
“Take a student…with a 23 on the ACT and a 4.0; this is pretty good for them, they now look spectacular—
before, they looked really good—but now they look spectacular, ” said NS senior Harrison Cook. “I guess that’s really what frustrates me the most about it, is that this student didn’t change anything about how they were doing anything, they didn’t retake the ACT to get a higher score, but they look better now just because college isn’t looking at something else.”
For a lot of students, the ACT is really stressful to take. The amount of stress brought on by the ACT can cause students to get scores that don’t reflect their academic performance and college readiness.
“It’s hard for me to take the ACT because when I go to take that test, I kind of have some testing anxiety and I’m not the
fastest reader,” said NS senior Kaylee Anderson. “I would have had a lot less money for scholarships if the ACT was counting. I feel like the ACT doesn’t really show you if you are college ready, because I’ve taken like a lot of concurrent enrollment classes and I’ve passed all of those, and I feel like I do well in them.”
Whether or not the ACT score was high, a student’s GPA seemed to be the best indicator of academic performance. Nationally, students with a high GPA (3.8 and above) who had a lower ACT score, but had taken college classes in high school, did better.
“After careful study both internally and looking at trends across the nation, we saw that the two best indicators of college success are High School GPA and class difficulty,” Harris said. “What I mean by this is, we saw that students who were entering college with high GPA but a low ACT were performing significantly better (grades, retention and persistence rates, graduation rates, etc.) than those who had the inverse.”
The ACT hasn’t seemed to be the best way of determining whether a student would do well in college. To do that, admissions would have to be on a more holistic basis. Even holistically, it is still diffi cult to show a student’s success in relation to their level of opportunity.
“If you want a better way of having college acceptance and stuff, you just have to look at more of the person,” Cook said. “Even that is difficult because then you get a student from some less fortunate background who was never able to do extracurricular and…their parents never helped them get a good score on the ACT or keep up their grades. They want to learn, they want to go places, they’re intelligent, but they just don’t have the resources.”
