The Test Guy

Yep. More kids should consider community college first. It's one of the best ways to get into an elite college, like Michigan or UF. It's also one of the best ways to get into Vanderbilt, Columbia, Northwestern, etc.

Transfer acceptance rates at non-Ivy elites are 4-5x higher than Freshmen admissions. It's a hell of a lot easier to get in from a community college than from a mid-level 4-year school.

Having taught at both an R1 university and at a CC, the only major difference between my students at either has been how much money their parents make.

I want my own kids to go to a CC first They will save a ton of money and enter their university more prepared for upper division work.

Yeah they’re changing the format to a shorter more compact version.

I’ll give you the long answer.

I’d recommend sticking with paper. It’s about the stability of the testing distribution.

Think about it this way: standardized tests aren’t just normalized ex post facto.

The SAT/ACT want a high precision forecast (+/- 5%) of correct answers for 90%+ questions.

Data from past tests is THE driving factor for future tests. In essence, they preemptively normalize results as they write the questions.

The ACT is changing everything —delivery, composition, and structure of the test.

Some old question types will still work, but they’ll perform differently. And they need a lot of new question types to account for…

Topic weight, format, test day experience, common test center issues, reduced question count and sampling bias.

It can compress the top end of the curve or cause a weird thing in the high-middle percentiles — like they smoothed out a bimod distribution.

The 2016 SAT release had results that were wonky. One math exam returned a 720/800 for 56/58 correct (instead of 780-800).