American College Testing: A Case Study

The American College Testing(ACT), a college entrance exam, has expanded in usage throughout the United States to a great extent. Three important developments of the ACT have occurred spanning from the creation of the test to legislations passed only a few years ago. First came the creation of the ACT and why it was created in 1959. The next development was in 2001 when Illinois and Colorado were the first states to require their high school students to take the ACT. The final development was in 2013 when Minnesota required all juniors in the class of 2016 to take the ACT to graduate. In 1959, the American College Testing was created by a University of Iowa professor named E.F Lindquist(Niche). As more and more students pursued college, the need for another standardized college entrance exam emerged(Enos,Zumas).The ACT was more focused on discovering a student’s strengths and weaknesses than their reasoning strength, which is determined in the SAT(Lindsay). In addition, …show more content…
The state provided $13.5 million to give every junior in the state the ability to take the ACT(Minnesota...). Because of the new mandate, students replace taking the GRAD with the ACT(Hudson). Hudson also remarked that a goal of the mandate was to show colleges the strengths and weaknesses of their students. The purpose of the passed legislation was that it would help minority students take a step towards college by taking a college entrance exam in school(Post). However, the mandatory ACT testing in Minnesota came to an abrupt end. In Erin Adler’s article, “Funding cuts force swift end to mandatory ACT testing in Minnesota schools” she states “The change is one of many that Minnesota students will see in the 2015-16 school year as a result of the Legislature slicing the Minnesota Department of Education testing budget nearly in half, from $42 million to $22