ACT Sees Openings for Expansion in Debate Over the SAT

By BEN GOSE

As a watchdog of the testing industry, Robert A. Schaeffer keeps a set of books about standardized exams above his desk.

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There's an entire row of volumes on the SAT, including some titles by well-known writers, but just one tome on the ACT: the ACT technical manual.

ACT Inc., which owns and administers the test, labors in relative obscurity, even though its college-entrance examination is taken by 1.1 million high-school seniors per year, nearly as many as take the SAT.

"ACT gets no attention -- and no scrutiny -- because of the humble Midwestern style" at the company's Iowa City headquarters, says Mr. Schaeffer, public-education director at the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, also known as FairTest. "They haven't engaged in the same kinds of ham-handed self-promotion that the folks at ETS and the College Board have."

The College Board and ACT (formerly known as American College Testing) have been fierce competitors for nearly half a century. Given the criticism that the SAT has encountered recently, one might think that the ACT company would be comfortable with its low profile.

But officials at the company see the latest assaults on the SAT -- particularly the possibility that the University of California might no longer require the test for admission -- as an opportunity for them to gain market share by highlighting how the two exams differ.

Richard C. Atkinson, the University of California's president, hopes to replace the SAT with a curriculum-based test, so that any "coaching" for the test would be directly related to high-school course work. ACT officials say they wonder why he didn't just turn to them.

Mr. Atkinson "is saying that the test needs to be anchored in what kids are studying," says Richard L. Ferguson, ACT's president. "The ACT is an excellent fit for that."

Whether the ACT is indeed more closely linked than the SAT to classroom learning is a matter of sharp debate. It is true that the ACT has always focused on academic specialties. Today, the test lasts about three hours and includes four tests -- English, mathematics, reading, and science reasoning. The SAT, which has tried mightily to move away from its roots in IQ tests, has only two parts -- verbal and math.

Mr. Ferguson says the ACT receives less criticism than the SAT because it "always has been and remains focused on achievement" rather than aptitude.

Wayne Camara, the College Board's vice president for research and development, says the two exams can't be all that different because students who do well on one test also do well on the other, and both have similar performance gaps between students of different races. The ACT is "basically an SAT-comparable test that they've sprinkled some curriculum-related stuff into," Mr. Camara says.

Mr. Ferguson says the two exams have "different philosophical underpinnings" even though students' performance doesn't vary much. "Two things can be predictive of the same thing and not be equivalent," he says.

Mr. Camara also dismisses the ACT's science-reasoning test. How can that test be based on the curriculum, he asks, when ACT officials have no way of knowing whether a student has taken chemistry or physics? ACT officials concede the problem, but say that's why their test is focused on reasoning skills rather than the specifics of scientific fields.

FairTest urges college-admission offices to abandon both tests, and while Mr. Schaeffer declines to says which test he prefers, his loathing for the SAT seems greater. "The types of questions on the ACT are more like the kinds of things that you would see on a test in high school -- they're about content," Mr. Schaeffer says. "The SAT is con sciously content- and curriculum-free. There are types of items on the SAT that simply don't exist in nature."

The SAT is widely used on both coasts, while the ACT dominates in the heartland and much of the South. Because a majority of the highly selective colleges are concentrated on the coasts, the controversies over using entrance exams in admissions have generally focused on the SAT.

Seppy Basili, vice president for pre-college programs at Kaplan, a test-preparation company, says the SAT still accounts for the bulk of its business, in part because the stakes in states where the ACT has the lead "have never risen to what the stakes are in the Northeast Corridor and California." But he says that demand for prep courses on the ACT has been growing, as more colleges -- including the Ivy League -- give students the option of submitting ACT scores rather than SAT scores.

The ACT's dominance in the Midwest may contribute to the company's obscurity. Many reporters for prominent news organizations attended college and now ply their trade on the coasts. "We're not on the beaten path for the major media," Mr. Ferguson says. "As a result, there's an inclination for people to go the easy route."

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