ACT Newsroom & Blog

“If you can not measure it, you can not improve it,” said the famous physicist Lord Kelvin.

As an organization committed for more than 55 years to helping people achieve education and workplace success, ACT firmly believes that measuring students’ college and career readiness in English, math, reading, and science will help improve their readiness.

In science, improving students’ knowledge and performance is more critical than ever: The U.S. Department of Commerce estimates that jobs in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) will grow 17 percent by 2018 and that more than 1.2 million of these jobs will go unfilled because of a lack of qualified workers.

Several states have enacted laws that explicitly require students’ science skills be tested. In addition, the recently reauthorized Elementary and Secondary Education Act—the Every Student Succeeds Act—upholds the importance of science testing in elementary, middle, and high school.

While other nationally recognized high school tests, such as the SAT, reference science content—if they do so at all—only in the context of assessing reading, writing/language, and mathematics skills, the ACT® test has a full, separate science test with 40 questions devoted to measuring skills and knowledge deemed important for success in first-year college science coursework. The constructs measured on the ACT science test are unique and different from those measured by the ACT math and reading tests.

The inclusion of both a math and a science test allows ACT to offer examinees a STEM score, which represents their overall performance on the two tests. Only through the comprehensive measurement of both math and science skills can this unique score be determined.

The ACT test has empirically derived benchmark scores that indicate readiness for success in first-year college courses in each individual subject area measured, including science. And our new STEM benchmark score indicates whether a student is well prepared for the types of first-year college courses required for a college STEM-related major.

The science test on every ACT test form includes at least one passage on each of the science disciplines that are most often offered to students in high school—biology, chemistry, Earth/space science, and physics.

In fact, science educators who participated in the recently released 2016 ACT National Curriculum Survey overwhelmingly prefer a stand-alone science assessment with authentic scientific scenarios. Eighty-six percent of middle school teachers, 89 percent of high school teachers, and 87 percent of college instructors felt that such a test is a better assessment of science knowledge than either science-oriented questions included in a math test or questions on an English or reading test involving science-oriented topics.

Of the 1.9 million graduates who took the ACT in 2015, 49 percent declared an interest in STEM majors and careers. These students need to be prepared for STEM jobs, so why in the world would we cut back on measuring students’ science knowledge and skills?

If we want students who are prepared for the millions of science, technology, engineering, and math jobs of the future, we must invest in teaching them science skills. But we also must assess their performance to measure what they have learned and to identify areas in need of improvement. The ACT is the only nationally recognized high school assessment that does this.

As is clear to most observers, not every student enjoys the same advantages as they advance through the K-12 educational system. Too often those disparate experiences not only impair their personal academic outcomes, they also limit the opportunities those students might have had to contribute their distinct perspectives to the colleges they might have attended—and, in the longer run, to contribute to the vitality of the communities they represent and to the prosperity and well-being of our country as a whole.

For generations, ACT has advocated that colleges and universities must use admissions criteria that are valid, reliable, holistic, and effective—and embrace the full range of students who could benefit from higher education. We believe the U.S. Supreme Court Fisher decision, to uphold the University of Texas’ efforts to promote diversity and inclusion, is consistent with that holistic perspective.

“A university is in large part defined by those intangible qualities which are incapable of objective measurement but which make for greatness,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote, adding “Considerable deference is owed to a university in defining those intangible characteristics, like student body diversity, that are central to its identity and educational mission.”

On June 22, just one day before the Fisher decision was announced, we launched the ACT Center for Equity in Learning, which will advocate for underserved students and young working learners.

In some ways, our timing could not have been more fortuitous.

Building on ACT’s core strengths in the high school to postsecondary years, the Center's initiatives will reflect ACT's interests in both college and career readiness and highlight the use of data, evidence, and thought leadership to close gaps in equity and achievement.

Until the quality of education is uniformly high for every student, the Center—and all of our society—still has work to do. As we strive to reach that ambitious standard of equality of opportunity for every young person, we appreciate and applaud the court’s counsel to use “valuable data about…different approaches to admissions” to “foster diversity” rather than “dilute it.”