美国所有四年制大学都开始接受ACT成绩

ALL FOUR-YEAR U.S. COLLEGES NOW ACCEPT ACT TEST

By Mary Beth Marklein, USA TODAY, March 19, 2007

（注：ACT是American College Testing Program的简称，主要用于本科录取，详情请见www.act.org）

The ACT college entrance exam, long the Avis ("We try harder") to the SAT's Hertz, is celebrating a bit of a milestone this year: It now says it is accepted by every four-year college and university in the USA that requires such a test.

All but a handful of colleges have long allowed applicants to submit either test. But Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C., started accepting ACTs with last fall's freshman class. And this year, officials at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, Calif., said they would accept applicants' ACT scores beginning this fall. It was the lone holdout of an earlier era, when geography dictated who took which test.

For decades, the 81-year-old SAT, owned by New York-based College Board, was the test of choice for colleges on the East and West Coasts. The ACT, which made its debut in 1959 and is based in Iowa City, was adopted primarily by schools in between.

Students in certain states still favor a particular test, but for colleges, the distinction faded as more schools sought to nationalize their student populations. Harvey Mudd, for example, wants more applicants from the ACT-dominant South and Midwest, which represent 9% and 7% of its applicant pool, respectively. California, an SAT state, represents 45%.

"Every year we would receive phone calls from students who took (only) the ACT" and had to be turned away, says interim admissions vice president Peter Osgood. "We didn't have a really defensible answer for why we didn't" accept their ACT scores.

The change at Harvey Mudd comes even as a growing number of colleges rethink standardized admissions tests altogether. Today, about 730 institutions have made certain such tests optional for at least some students.

Even so, the SAT and ACT are serving more students than ever.

The ACT has been particularly aggressive in working with states to launch statewide achievement tests. Illinois and Colorado, where the ACT has long dominated, now require all high school juniors to take the ACT, and Michigan will do so beginning this spring. Kentucky begins an ACT requirement next school year, and Wyoming and Tennessee are on board with similar arrangements with the ACT. The College Board is working with Maine.

As more admissions-savvy kids try their hand at both tests, the ACT also is seeing rapid growth in SAT-dominant states. California saw a 40% increase in ACT takers since 2001; New York, a 23% rise. Numbers more than doubled in New Jersey and Vermont, and more than tripled in Connecticut.

Even so, the SAT remains the dominant test nationally. Not only does it serve more students each year, the number of graduating seniors taking the SAT overall increased at a faster rate since 2001. Last year, nearly 1.5 million high school graduates had taken the SAT; 1.2 million had taken the ACT.

But two notable wrinkles surfaced when last year's test data were released. The College Board reported a drop in SAT takers of nearly 10,000 students; the ACT was up more than 20,000. And the SAT national average scores dropped; ACT scores rose significantly.

College Board vice president Wayne Camara says it's too soon to know whether SAT numbers will be up next year, though early indicators are promising.

Some industry watchers attribute the SAT's dips to the debut of its revised version in 2005, which affected 2006 high school graduates. "Any time there's a new test, you expect some sort of change in the market," says Seppy Basili, a vice president at test-prep company Kaplan Inc.

But Ned Johnson, founder of PrepMatters, a test-prep company that serves the Washington, D.C., area, says he wouldn't be surprised if even more students in SAT-dominant regions like his turn to the ACT.

One reason, he says, has to do with the College Board's handling of a scoring error that affected more than 4,000 students. Colleges and students were notified of the problem at the height of the ultra-anxiety-producing admissions season. Some critics say the College Board should have spoken up sooner.