“Wow, that was absolutely terrible!” were the first words out of my mouth as I left school after taking the ACT for the first time. “Terrible” wasn’t just the best word to describe how I did on the test (well, probably. I’m still way too afraid to actually check my score), it was also a great descriptor of the test experience itself.
Dead iPads, headaches from staring at a screen for hours, ten-minute “lunch” breaks, questions that make absolutely no sense and having no time to actually answer those questions that make absolutely no sense are all quirks of the ACT and SAT process. These reasons alone were more than influential enough to make me anti-ACT. Not anti-digital testing per se, more anti-testing. Period.
Who needs college anyway, right?
Little did I know that my testing experience was actually one of the only “normal” ones in the building. My group finished a few minutes late, which was a luxury compared to over half the rest of the school who were all pushed back varying amounts of time due to technology issues. One group even had to retake the entire test the next day, a day usually reserved for only students with extended time.
“I did not want to come back on the day off because I planned on hanging out with my friends the night before, sleeping in, and getting a bunch of my homework done,” junior Lauren Seyer, who had her test pushed back to Wednesday, said in an email interview. “I was super annoyed.”
Illinois high schools switched to the online ACT this year after success with the digital SAT the year prior, and experienced technology issues. The exact cause of the issues are unknown, yet many staff members, such as Assessment Supervisor Laura Bernstein, believe they were primarily a result of the servers being overwhelmed from too many schools being active on them at the same time.
“There are different windows, so not everyone in the state was testing at the same time, [but] obviously there were a lot of schools testing on that day,” Bernstein said. “I’m not exactly sure what the issue was, but it was an ACT issue, [not] a school issue.”
Administrators are equally in the dark. The official statements sent out to students and staff from Superintendent Scott Rowe and Principal Greg Minter via email on April 8 suggest a similar root.
“Things did not go as planned due to significant issues on ACT’s end,” Minter said in his email. Rowe’s email was similar, shifting accountability to the ACT website “[The ACT] experienced significant delays due to ongoing technical issues with the ACT testing website.”
The switch from the paper SAT to the digital version, and then to the digital ACT was a decision made by the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) and College Board as a result of the ISBE’s “contract with the College Board for the high school accountability assessment end[ing] June 30, 2024,” according to the ISBE website. By state procurement law, a competitive procedure for the new version of testing is issued and voted on based on three aspects: technical specifications, commitment to diversity and price. Based on these three aspects, the ACT received the most votes overall from members of the College Board and ISBE.
As someone who actually prefers digital state testing to the paper version, even I can admit that this year’s ACT was much more noticeably hurt by the tests being hosted digitally. These technology-exclusive problems have caused many to question whether switching to online testing was a good idea in the first place. 60% of this year’s proctors prefer paper testing, whereas 32% prefer paper and the remaining 8% would prefer some kind of a combination of the two (according to a survey of 25 proctors at Prospect).
“Given that it was our first year with digital [testing], the instructions weren’t as, like we call it, intuitive, so it felt like it wasn’t as user-friendly,” an anonymous proctor said. “With the tech side not running smoothly, I think paper is a more sound option.”
While the technology issues were enough to make some proctors turn against digital testing, others vastly prefer paper to online testing regardless of how well the website performs.
“It’s not fair [that] you’ve been reading your entire life on paper, [then] test on an iPad,” Master Scheduler Angel Lopez Contreras said. “That’s not the reality of life.”
English teacher Tim Mcdermott, who has proctored state tests for many years, agrees with this notion, believing that if paper has worked for so long, there wasn’t much reason to change it.
“Using technology is difficult to deal with,” Mcdermott said. “[It has] a learning curve.”
However, much like technology, paper testing is far from perfect. Every single student gets a packet consisting of around 50 pages, which is not only harder to produce and store compared to online data, but also much worse for the environment.
According to Record Nations in 2023, schools already consume an average of 320,000 sheets of paper a year. Assuming that there are 2,152 students at Prospect and each one receives an ACT packet that is 50 pages long, the ACT test alone makes up about .34% of our school’s paper usage, or 107,600 sheets of paper per year.
If that doesn’t seem like a lot to you, think about it this way: for every ten years that Prospect does digital testing, we save 1,076,000 sheets of paper. According to the 8 Billion Trees program, one average-sized pine tree produces about 10,000 sheets of paper, meaning that every ten years that Prospect does state testing digitally, we save about 107.6 trees.
Finally, because ISBE’s decision on paper/online testing is the same across all Illinois high schools, all 807 high schools in Illinois staying digital for a decade would save approximately 86,833.2 trees.
That’s enough math to make my head hurt, so I’ll stop there. As you can probably tell, I favor digital testing, although there are more benefits to it beyond environmentally. For example, school psychologist Andrea Schwarz proctored for the first time this year, and setting up the test digitally was easier than expected due to the guidance it provides.
“The online version prompted me through all the steps, so I knew I wasn’t missing anything,” Schwarz said. “[It] was really nice.”
Clearly the online version isn’t perfect, as even Schwarz admits that it is far from ideal.
”The worst part was when the computers were crashing and things were out of our control,” Schwarz said. “I liked it online, but obviously without the crashing and internet [issues].”
While it is unlikely for D214 to switch fully back to paper, technology issues will be ironed out over time. Just within the initial testing day and the day after, staff were able to run the test at a much more effective level, which is hopefully representative of how quickly D214 will rid the ACT of the issues it was plagued with this year.
While the future of state-mandated testing is likely on our screens, social studies teacher Chris Stanford suggests a more inclusive option: the choice between paper and digital for each student.
“I wish kids had a choice,” Stanford said. “There are some kids that are better [testing] online, and there are some kids who are better on paper … it’s more efficient online, as the proctor, [but] I think different kids work better with different [mediums].”
However, according to Bernstein, a state test incorporating both aspects of digital and physical assessments would be difficult, as it is already challenging enough to manage similar strategies for students with accommodations.
“[It] would be logistically hard to do,” Bernstein said. “I know some kids that have accommodations can apply and test on paper, but that would [need] to be a special circumstance. They need documentation to allow that.”
There are good and bad ways to do everything, no matter what that “thing” is. There’s a worst way to spend a sunny afternoon at the beach with your friends, and there’s a best way to endure the torture that is the ACT: online. Issues with the online ACT will be ironed out over time, but the environmental impact of paper testing is already outdated.
And, y’know, kind of killing our planet. Don’t we still care about that?
Regardless of whether your test was postponed, your preference between the SAT and ACT or how terrible you are at state testing (trust me, I can really relate to this one), try to keep an open mind as Illinois continues with online testing. Time will not only show the environmental benefits, but also how much better digital truly is for the future of state testing.
We also can’t really do anything about it, either, so … might as well, right?
