Greybull is a small high school nestled among the gray-brown buttes of northwestern Wyoming. As in five other states, juniors take the ACT test, not for college entry but to see how they perform and how curriculum might be improved.
“We do watch the scores, and we do make changes in curriculum based on them,” says principal Mark Fritz, who adds that Wyoming has used the ACT as an assessment tool since 2005. “For example, we noted a problem in expository writing because of the scores and we worked to correct it.”
Fritz has noted another trend — minorities tend to do better on the test when it becomes a routine. “We had 12 Hispanic students in the 11th grade and they all did better (than the Hispanics in the previous class).”
Using the six states as a base, academics are trying to assess how using the ACT test affects students and schools. Data is incomplete, but trends include improved performance by African-American or Hispanic students who generally score lower than Whites or Asian-Americans. Some believe that more students tend to go to college after taking the ACT, but the program’s critics claim that teachers end up teaching the ACT test and not real content.
The ACT, developed by ACT, Inc. in Iowa City, Iowa, measures competence in English, mathematics, scientific reasoning and reading. It came about to help assess the hordes of veterans who returned from World War II with college aspirations. Popular in the Midwest and parts of the South, the ACT competes with the Scholastic Aptitude Test, which dates to the 1920s and tends to be used for college admission on the East and West coasts.
In 2001, ACT pitched the test to state boards of education as a way to assess 11th-grade proficiency. Besides Wyoming, other states with statewide ACT policies are Colorado, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan and North Dakota.
ACT spokesman Scott Gomer says the test helps school systems identify weaknesses, which allows them to adjust their curriculum or teaching skills.
