Behind the Scenes: What It Takes to Get the ACT in Front of your Kids

This post is part of a series in which Influencers go behind the scenes to explain in detail one aspect of their work. Read all the stories here and write your own (please include the hashtag #BehindTheScenes in the body of your post).

If you think taking the ACT can be hard, you’d be right. Only one student in 10,000 earns a perfect score.

For a moment, though, consider the folks giving the ACT. We also strive to earn perfect scores because we believe that all examinees deserve near-perfect experiences each time they take the ACT.

Six times each year, as many as a half-million students report to schools and colleges across America (on five of those dates, students are also testing internationally). All told, we have more than 7,000 test centers across the United States and more than 400 additional test centers worldwide.

Securing those test centers begins more than a year in advance. Each year, we also develop and update more than 150 documents, ranging from manuals to posters, as well as the www.actstudent.org website. Since ACT staff can’t be everywhere, we also have a network of more than 150,000 dedicated professionals who help to deliver our tests over the course of a year.

While “testing” has long been synonymous with #2 pencils, that’s no longer true for student registrations. Five years ago, 57 percent of students registered online to take the ACT. Last year, it was 97 percent.

Students with disabilities may apply for accommodations. For April 2013 alone, we received more than 16,000 requests, each of which is individually evaluated and acted upon. In the spirit of the ACT math section, multiply that figure times six test dates (and the answer is a BIG number).

Of course, also important to fairness is the test itself. Every question (what we call an “item”) is exhaustively reviewed to ensure its phrasing and content are clear, fair, and free of bias. We use external writers who embody a wide variety of backgrounds to contribute potential items so that the people who help write our tests reflect the full range of students who take our tests. Once submitted, every item is individually reviewed and edited, and the surviving items are selected and analyzed as a group (using “scaling” and “equating” processes) to ensure that a score on any one given test — let’s say a 24 — is the equivalent to a 24 earned a year ago.

From start to finish, it may take two years and 40 steps for an item to advance from draft to delivery — that moment of truth when it appears before an examinee during an actual administration.

What might provide a more tangible vision of the complexity of the testing process would be watching it come together at our distribution center, where weeks before the test date, we start packing boxes. As many as 18 different documents need to be sent to each of the thousands of test centers, in quantities ranging from just a handful to many hundreds for our largest centers. Our distribution team works tirelessly to ensure each test center receives exactly what it needs — on time and EVERY time.

While a student may think there’s nothing worse than struggling out of bed early on a Saturday morning to take a test, there’s at least one thing worse: struggling out of bed and then finding out at the school that there’s no test to take. In short, we do everything humanly possible to ensure that never happens.

After each test date, the testing materials are shipped back to ACT. The boxes are reopened, and the enclosed answer documents are retrieved, scanned, and scored. Careful quality control processes take place at each step before millions of score reports are sent — in hard copy form or electronically — to students, high schools, colleges, universities, and scholarship agencies across the United States and around the world.

After each administration, we also need to follow up on irregularities. It could be a blizzard, a power outage, or a student who attempted to gain unfair advantage — or the completely unexpected. On one occasion a cat fell through the ceiling into a room of students, some of whom may have lost one of their nine lives from the fright.

These few paragraphs I’ve been able to share substantially understate the effort, but sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. In that spirit, please feel free to view the short video below that tells the story in a different way.

Like our students, ACT is tested. Our national and international test dates, combined with our state and district testing opportunities, result in nearly three-and-a-half million ACT administrations each year — more than any college readiness assessment in the United States.

And like our students, we do our best to earn a perfect score every time.

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Jon Whitmore is the CEO of ACT, Inc. ACT’s services include a broad range of assessments encompassing all levels of the educational continuum and a growing array of assessment systems supportive of economic and workforce development worldwide. Before joining ACT, Jon was the president of San Jose State University and Texas Tech University, provost of the University of Iowa, and a professor of theatre at numerous universities.

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