ACT and Prediction

Jay Mathews:

Anyone know details of the value of the ACT? What do you think of standardized testing?

If you are among the growing number of students who have taken or plan to take the ACT college entrance test, pay attention. An independent analysis of results in Ohio has concluded that two of the ACT’s four subject tests — Reading and Science — are lousy predictors of college success and should be ignored by admissions officers.

The Stanford and University of Chicago scholars who wrote the report, recently published by the National Bureau of Economic Research(NBER), say scores from the other two ACT subject tests, Mathematics and English, “are much more tightly correlated with college success than are Reading and Science scores. In fact, after controlling for Mathematics and English scores, Reading and Science provide essentially no predictive power regarding college outcomes.”