Original research has always been a foundational part of ensuring that ACT tests are fair and valid for all learners and a key resource for advancing the education assessment industry. ACT researcher presentations included:
- Improving Zero-Shot Classification of Alerting Content Essays with Automatically Generated Descriptions, presented by Sungjin Nam. “We developed an automatic process for a Large Language Model to detect alerting essay responses, such as mentions of suicide, drug use, or abuse, and iteratively improve the model’s performance without any prior training.”
- Predicting Student Degree Completion with ACTC Score and HSGPA: Mediated by First Year College GPA, presented by Edgar Sanchez. “By assessing the positive relationship between high school GPA (HSGPA) and ACT Composite (ACTC) with early college outcomes like first-year GPA (FTYGPA) we demonstrate the predictive validity of these precollege achievement measure on longer-term college outcomes like degree at years four and six.”
- Impact of ACT Enhancements on Student Perceptions and Performance, presented by Shalini Kapoor, Chi-Yu Huang, Hongling Wang, Chen Qui, Scott Wood, and Dongmei Li. “Giving students more time per item and reducing test length had small, positive effects on their experience. These changes led to fewer omitted items, fewer rapid responses, and an increased perception of having enough time to complete the test.”
“ACT is committed to continuous test improvement and innovations that allow all learners to showcase their skills and knowledge as they pursue college and career success,” said Joanna Gorin, vice president of solution design and digital science. “We were proud to present this research and especially appreciated the opportunity to highlight the thorough vetting process to ensure the continued validity of score interpretations.”
