As many HC students know, the college admissions process can be daunting. Managing grades, extracurriculars, volunteering, leadership, and more throughout high school is incredibly difficult, especially when a standardized test with significant implications for many students’ futures is thrown into the mix. As such, the lead-up to the ACT was a stressful time for many students.
That said, the difficulty of the test was at least partially abated by the consistency of the system. HC provides students with two testing opportunities, which meant that students could learn from their first attempts and improve in later years. However, a change at the state level has thrown this into jeopardy, as the Kentucky Department of Education made a shocking change by shifting standardized testing from the ACT to SAT.
The DoE justified this by telling Wave News that the change will “save the state more than $350,000,” and many administrators are confident as well.
Hardin County Schools’ Chief Academic Officer, Greg Sutton, told the same source that “I think that this will allow kids to showcase what they really know, and what they could achieve.”
That’s an excellent sentiment, but it does ignore some key issues with this sudden change. Sutton himself actually admitted that the transition was rapid, telling Wave News that, “We were into this school year before we found out that this change was going to be made. I think that we really had to act quick[ly] to understand more, and get that information out to our principals and our students as fast as possible, and we did.”
Sutton may believe that the transition was effectively communicated, but this does not change the fact that the switch happened only months before testing, rather than over the summer or during the previous year. This is an issue for one critical reason: the ACT and SAT are very different tests.
Harvard Summer School finds that, “The ACT tends to be best for students who excel in science and time management and prefer direct questions, while the SAT is best for students who prefer analytical thinking and have strong problem-solving skills.”
There’s nothing wrong with either of those things, of course, but it’s plain to see that the two are quite distinct. Because of this change, HC students were caught off guard. Their months or, in some cases, years, of studying had to be changed rapidly, resulting in an even higher stress load during a time when anxiety is already near its limit.
The good news is, the impact will be short-lived. Future HC students will only have to prepare for the SAT, so as long as there are no future changes the system should stabilize. That said, the change should have been made clear in advance. As it happened, the transition created a great deal of unneeded stress for HC students, and it should be questioned whether that was worth saving the state $350,000.
