Digital ACT's

Last Wednesday, ACT, the standardized testing organization, announced its plans to make The ACT® college exam more computer-based by offering online administration of the test, beginning in the spring of 2015.ACT’s decision to offer an online, computer-based test will help high school students throughout the nation, and I hope that other standardized testing programs, such as the SAT, will follow ACT’s steps in moving towards computer-based testing.First of all, let’s think about the vast amounts of time we have spent trying to fill in tiny bubbles completely without going over the tiny circles that are given to us while taking the standardized tests that are supposedly quite important in getting us to the college of our choice.Also, let’s not forget about the times we went absolutely crazy, trying to erase the pencil marks after realizing that the initial choice that we penciled in was wrong. Apart from time issues, the fill-in bubble system sometimes leads to scores that don’t necessarily reflect the student’s intelligence; I have heard various stories where kids would forget to skip a bubble on the answer sheet after skipping a problem and would thus get a score nearly half of what they would have received if they hadn’t made the mistake of filling in the bubbles for the wrong problems.To make a long story short, the computer-based testing system will easily solve the problems caused by the traditional fill-in bubble system. As for the time issue, all that a student needs to do in order to answer a question is click on the answer that they think is correct; this would allow students to focus more on how to approach the problems and answer them correctly, rather than on how to correctly fill in a circle on the answer sheet so that he or she would not be penalized even with a correct answer. In addition, there is no room for students to fill in the wrong bubbles in these online, computer-based tests, because questions will be directly followed by the answer choices they refer to. In these ways, standardized testing companies will be able to accurately measure and score students’ performances on these tests, and consequently, students will be able to present the schools of their choice with a better representation of their intelligence.There have been counterarguments that we do not yet have sufficient technology for fluid computer-based tests, in which there are risks of computers malfunctioning during tests, and this issue about technology is definitely an issue at concern. However, this is why ACT is giving themselves two years before the computer-based programs launch, which is more than enough time for technology to advance itself to the point where malfunctions are no longer a concern for online tests. This issue of technology is also why it has taken ACT (and hopefully other standardized testing organizations as well) such a long time to announce plans for computer-based testing with a sense of certainty that it would be a successful alternative to the traditional paper-and-pencil system of testing.The ACT website states that one of its missions is to provide students, parents, teachers, and counselors what they call “College Readiness Standards.” The goals of the College Readiness Standards are to “communicate widely shared learning goals and educational expectations, relate the test scores to the types of skills needed for success in high school and beyond, and to understand the increasing complexity of skills across the score ranges in English, mathematics, reading, and science,” according to the website. Overall, by creating a means for a more representative measure of students’ depth of knowledge, computer-based testing will allow the ACT to give students, parents, teachers, and counselors a more accurate standard on a student’s “college readiness.”