Indiana students’ English language arts scores have remained essentially unchanged for five straight years despite major state investments in literacy, although math scores grew over the same time period, new test results show.

The 2025 ILEARN results released Wednesday show that overall, 40.6% of students scored proficient or better on the English language arts portion of the state test, which is administered in grades 3-8.

That’s a decline of around half a percentage point from last year, and about the same percentage of students who reached proficiency as in previous years going back to 2021.

Since the 2022-23 school year, Indiana has overhauled its reading instruction in early grades to better align with the . This has included  earmarked for placing literacy coaches in schools and evaluating teacher training programs, as well as a new law to third graders who don’t pass the state reading test, the IREAD.

IREAD scores are expected in August.

In this year’s ILEARN results, the share of third grade students proficient in English language arts improved 1.6 percentage points over last year. But their proficiency rate has risen by only 1.7 percentage points since 2021, due to a decline in performance in 2023 and 2024.

In fourth grade, around 41.4% of students were proficient in English language arts in 2025, a .4 percentage point drop since last year, but a 1.8 percentage point improvement over 2021.

Meanwhile, Indiana students’ math proficiency has increased since 2021, when around 36.9% of all students were proficient in math. In 2025, 42.1% of students tested proficient, an increase of around 1.2 percentage points over 2024.

Notably, math performance in third grade has steadily declined since 2023.

Under passed in 2025, math instruction will see changes similar to the science of reading shift, beginning with a math skills screener for younger students in 2026-27.

Overall, 31.2% of all Indiana students scored proficient in both English language arts and math in 2025. Indiana students recently posted improved scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the nation’s report card, in .

‘An urgent need to support middle school students’

The bifurcation in math and English language arts performance is most prominent in grades 6-8, where some of the greatest declines in English language arts proficiency and greatest increases in math proficiency occurred this year.

In seventh grade, for example, math proficiency improved 2 percentage points over last year, and 5.4 percentage points since 2021. But in English language arts, proficiency has fallen 3.9 percentage points since last year and 3.2 percentage points since 2021.

State education officials have been highlighting the in these grades since 2022.

This year, they’ve linked the state reading overhaul to the difference in scores, with a board presentation pointing out that older students would not have benefitted from the changes in reading instruction that began in 2022-23.

“While we are positively moving and improving in math, there is an urgent need to support middle school students in English/language arts,” said Indiana Secretary of Education Katie Jenner in a news release about the scores.

“These are our students who intermittently came to school during the pandemic,” said board member Pat Mapes of older students. “They’re going to constantly be catching up.”

Scores among different student racial, ethnic, and social groups have remained relatively flat, with some notable exceptions.

For example, Black students’ proficiency in both English language arts and math has grown each year since 2021, with around 21.8% of Black students now proficient in English and 19% proficient in math — an increase of around 4.4 and 7.4 percentage points, respectively. Black students and Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander students were the only student groups to improve in English language arts proficiency since last year.

Math proficiency among English learner students has improved by 4.2 points since 2021, but English proficiency has fallen from a peak of 13.9% in 2022 to 12.7% — around the same rate as in 2021.

Proficiency rates for students who are eligible for free and reduced-price meals have increased from 22% in 2021 to 28.6% this year.

See how students at your school did on the ILEARN test using the table below:

The 2024-2025 school year was the first year that schools could choose to administer the ILEARN at several checkpoints throughout the year, with the goal of giving educators more data on student performance. Around 75% of schools participated in this pilot.

Beginning next year, all students and schools will participate in the checkpoint model. Department of Education officials said that beginning next year, the state will roll out portals for parents to view the results.

SAT reading scores improve, math scores flat

The state also released SAT scores Wednesday in a presentation to the State Board of Education.

Though not required for graduation, the SAT currently serves as the state’s federally mandated high school assessment, and students can use them to meet one of the state’s graduation pathways.

Around 54.8% of 11th grade test-takers met the college-ready benchmark for reading and writing in 2025, an increase of around 2.7 percentage points over 2024. Math proficiency remained flat, with around 25.4% of students meeting the benchmark.

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. Sign up for their newsletters at .

To others, it’s simply a case of helicopter parents gone wild.

The case, filed last month, tackles key questions of academic integrity, the college admissions arms race and even the purpose of school in an age when students can outsource onerous tasks like thinking to a chatbot.

While its immediate outcome will largely serve just one family — the student’s parents want a grade changed so their son can apply early-admission to elite colleges — the case could ultimately prompt school districts nationwide to develop explicit policies on AI. 

If the district, in a prosperous community on Boston’s South Shore, is forced to change the student’s grade, that could also prompt educators to focus more clearly on the knife’s edge of AI’s promises and threats, confronting a key question: Does AI invite students to focus on completing assignments rather than actual learning?

“When it comes right down to it, what do we want students to do?” asked John Warner, a well-known and author of . “What do we want them to take away from their education beyond a credential? Because this technology really does threaten the integrity of those credentials. And that’s why you see places trying to police it.”

‘Unprepared in a technology transition’

The facts of the case seem simple enough: The parents of a senior at Hingham High School have sued the school district, saying their son was wrongly penalized as a junior for relying on AI to research and write a history project that he and a partner were assigned in Advanced Placement U.S. History. The teacher used the anti-plagiarism tool Turnitin, which flagged a draft of the essay about NBA Hall of Famer Kareem Abdul Jabbar’s civil rights activism as possibly containing AI-generated material. So she used a “revision history” tool to uncover how many edits the students had made, as well as how long they spent writing. She discovered “many large cut and paste items” in the first draft, suggesting they’d relied on outside sources for much of the text. She ran the draft through two other digital tools that also indicated it had AI-generated content and gave the boys a D on the assignment. 

From there, the narrative gets a bit murky. 

On the one hand, the complaint notes, when the student and his partner started the essay last fall, the district didn’t have a policy on using AI for such an assignment. Only later did it lay out prohibitions against AI.

The boy’s mother, Jennifer Harris, last month asked a local , “How do you know if you’re crossing a line if the line isn’t drawn?”

The pair tried to explain that using AI isn’t plagiarism, telling teachers there’s considerable debate over its use in academic assignments, but that they hadn’t tried to pass off others’ work as their own. 

For its part, the district says Hingham students are trained to know plagiarism and academic dishonesty when they see it. 

District officials declined to be interviewed, but in an affidavit, Social Studies Director Andrew Hoey said English teachers at the school regularly review proper citation and research techniques — and they set expectations for AI use.

Social studies teachers, he said, can justifiably expect that skills taught in English class “will be applied to all Social Studies classes,” including AP US History — even if they’re not laid out explicitly. 

A spokesperson for National History Day, the group that sponsored the assignment, provided �鶹��Ʒ with a link to its , which say students may use AI to brainstorm topic ideas, look for resources, review their writing for grammar and punctuation and simplify the language of a source to make it more understandable.

They can’t use AI to “create elements of your project” such as writing text, creating charts, graphs, images or video. 

In March, the school’s National Honor Society faculty advisor, Karen Shaw, said the pair’s use of AI was “the most egregious” violation of academic honesty she and others had seen in 16 years, according to the lawsuit. The society rejected their applications.

Peter S. Farrell, the family’s attorney, said the district “used an elephant gun to slay a mouse,” overreacting to what’s basically a misunderstanding.

The boys’ failing grade on the assignment, as well as the accusation of cheating, kept him out of the Honor Society, the lawsuit alleges. Both penalties have limited his chances to get into top colleges on early decision, as he’d planned this fall.

The student, who goes unnamed in the lawsuit, is “a very, very bright, capable, well-rounded student athlete” with a 4.3 GPA, a “perfect” ACT score and an “almost perfect” SAT score, said Farrell. “If there were a perfect plaintiff, he’s it.” 

While the boy earned a C+ in the course, he scored a perfect 5 on the AP exam last spring, according to the lawsuit. His exclusion from the Honor Society, Farrell said, “really shouldn’t sit right with anybody.”

For a public high school to take such a hard-nosed position “simply because they got caught unprepared in a technology transition” doesn’t serve anyone’s interests, Farrell said. “And it’s certainly not good for the students.”

Ultimately, the school’s own investigation found that over the past two years it had inducted into the Honor Society seven other students who had academic integrity infractions, Farrell said. The student at the center of the lawsuit was allowed to reapply and was inducted on Oct. 15.

“They knew that there was no leg to stand on in terms of the severity of that sanction,” Farrell said.

‘Districts are trying to take it seriously’

While Hingham didn’t adopt a districtwide AI policy until this school year, it’s actually ahead of the curve, said Bree Dusseault, the principal and managing director of the , a think tank at Arizona State University. Most districts have been cautious to put out formal guidance on AI.

Dusseault contributed an affidavit on behalf of the plaintiffs, laying out the fragmented state of AI uptake and guidance. She more than 1,000 superintendents last year and found that just 5% of districts had policies on AI, with another 31% promising to develop them in the future. Even among CRPE’s group of 40 “early adopter” school districts that are exploring AI and encouraging teachers to experiment with it, just 26 had published policies in place. 

They’re hesitant for a reason, she said: They’re trying to figure out what the technology’s implications are before putting rules in writing. 

“Districts are trying to take it seriously,” she said. “They’re learning the capacity of the technology, and both the opportunities and the risks it presents for learning.” But so often they’re surprised by new technological developments and capabilities that they never imagined. 

Even if they’re hesitant to commit to full-blown policies, Dusseault said, districts should consider more informal guidelines that clearly lay out for students what academic integrity, plagiarism and acceptable use are. Districts that are “totally silent” on AI run the risk of student confusion and misuse. And if a district is penalizing students for AI use, it needs to have clear policy language explaining why.

That said, a few observers believe the case boils down to little more than a cheating student and his helicopter parents.

Benjamin Riley, founder of , an AI-focused education think tank, said the episode seems like an example of clear-cut academic dishonesty. Everyone involved in the civil case, he said, especially the boy’s parents and their lawyer, “should be embarrassed. This isn’t some groundbreaking lawsuit that will help define the contours of how we use AI in education; it’s helicopter parenting run completely amok that may serve as catnip to journalists (and their editors) but does nothing to illuminate anything.”

Alex Kotran, founder of , a nonprofit that offers a free AI literacy curriculum, said the honor society director’s statement about the boys’ alleged academic dishonesty makes him think “there’s clearly plenty more than what we’re hearing from the student.” While schools genuinely do need to understand the challenge of getting AI policies right, he said, “I worry that this is just a student with overbearing parents and a big check to throw lawyers at a problem.”

Others see the case as surfacing larger-scale problems: Writing in this week, Jane Rosenzweig, director of the and author of the newsletter, said the Massachusetts case is “less about AI and more about a family’s belief that one low grade will exclude their child from the future they want for him, which begins with admission to an elite college.”

That problem long predated ChatGPT, Rosenzweig wrote. But AI is putting our education system on a collision course “with a technology that enables students to bypass learning in favor of grades.”

“I feel for this student,” said Warner, the writing coach. “The thought that they need to file a lawsuit because his future is going to be derailed by this should be such an indictment of the system.”

The case underscores the need for school districts to rethink how they interact with students in the Age of AI, he said. “This stuff is here. It’s embedded in the tools students use to do their work. If you open up Microsoft Word or Google Docs or any of this stuff, it’s right there.”

Perhaps as a result, Warner said, students have increasingly come to view school more transactionally, with assignments as a series of products rather than as an opportunity to learn and develop important skills.

“I’ve taught those students,” he said. “For the most part, those are a byproduct of disengagement, not believing [school] has anything to offer — and that the transaction can be satisfied through ‘non-work’ rather than work.”

His observations align with recent research by Dusseault’s colleagues, who that four graduating classes of high school students, or about 13.5 million students, had been affected by the pandemic, with many “struggling academically, socially, and emotionally” as they enter adulthood.

Ideally, Warner said, AI tools should offer an opportunity to refocus students to emphasize process over product. “This is a natural design for somebody who teaches writing,” he said, “because I’m obsessed with process.”Warner recalled giving a recent series of talks at , a small, alternative liberal arts college in California, where he encountered students who said they had no use for AI chatbots. They preferred to think through difficult problems themselves. “They were just like, ‘Aw, man, I don’t want to use that stuff. Why do I want to use that stuff? I’ve got thoughts.’”

Only a quarter of Hoosier highschoolers who took the SAT during the last academic year earned college-ready scores in both reading and math, according to newly-released results.

More than 80,000 high school students, primarily juniors, took the test in 2023-24. Of those, about 24% of students met the readiness benchmark on both subject portions, according to the Indiana Department of Education (IDOE). That’s a 4.4% decrease compared to last year, continuing a two-year downward trend.

The were released Wednesday and discussed by the State Board of Education (SBOE).

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State law requires IDOE to administer a national college entrance exam to high school students before graduation.

Scores on the decline

The SAT includes math, reading and writing sections. The assessment, administered by the College Board, scores students as “At College-Ready,” “Approaching College-Ready,” or “Below College-Ready,” depending on their performance.

A student who scores “Approaching” with one more year remaining in high school is expected to be at “At College-Ready” by graduation.

Students who score at or above the benchmark have a 75% chance of earning at least a C in their first semester of credit-bearing college courses in that subject area, IDOE officials said.

Almost 52% of high school students met the assessment’s reading and writing benchmarks, alone, which is about the same as last year.

Just 25.2% of Indiana students showed college-readiness in math — 5.5% lower than in 2022-23 and 7.7% lower than in 2021-22, according to IDOE. In the most recent school year, 22.1% of students were “Approaching” college-readiness, and 52.7% were below the readiness benchmark.

A new SAT

IDOE officials emphasized that the College Board is seeing a decrease in scores nationally, including in Indiana.

“When we initially saw our data and heard from schools, there was a bit of concern because of the SAT scores,” said Indiana Secretary of Education Katie Jenner. “But there were some assessment shifts which caused the mean score nationwide to go down, and in Indiana.”

In 2023-2024, College Board changed the test design, which can often impact assessment scores.

The SAT’s switch to an adaptive assessment means questions provided to individual students become more or less difficult, depending on how they perform from one stage of the exam to the next. The new SAT is now shorter, has fewer items and shorter reading passages, takes less time to complete, and permits calculator use throughout, according to the College Board.

Hoosier students who are — meaning they missed at least 18 days, or 10% of the school year — scored substantially lower on the SAT. Only 17.5% of those who were chronically absent showed college-readiness on the SAT in 2023-24 compared to 41.1% who earned the benchmark and were not chronically absent.

that about 40% of students statewide missed 10 or more school days during the 2022-23 academic year, and nearly one in five were chronically absent.

Jenner said Wednesday the results underscore the urgency behind the state’s ongoing work to rethink and redesign the state’s high school experience.

“We have work to do. We know that we’re going to continue to roll up our sleeves as educators and keep working hard, and also partner with our parents and families,” Jenner said. “It has to be a partnership. We can maximize learning the most — we know this — as educators, plus the parents and families, partnering for the child.”

State board member B.J. Watts additionally said that the SAT college-readiness data is likely skewed, given that it does not consider students who don’t plan to pursue higher education after high school but are required to take the exam anyway.

“I think it’s important for us to remember …now, every single student is taking this test. There’s probably some students that are not college bound — don’t want to be college bound — that may not take this test as seriously as others,” Watts said. “I don’t want us to lose sight of that  — we’re forcing students to take a test that they have zero interest in … those numbers may be a little skewed by those students that, truly, this test has no value to them.”

Changes coming to high school requirements

While many colleges have opted to make standardized tests optional, most still use PSAT, SAT and ACT scores to make admissions decisions.

Many scholarships and merit organizations additionally use the exams to award students money for college.

Currently, Indiana officials are undertaking , including proposed diploma changes.

, according to state officials, is maximized “flexibility” for students to personalize learning pathways and experiences, including with college courses taken while still in high school, as well as the ability to count internships, apprenticeships, military experience and other work-based learning toward their graduation requirements.

As laid out in the proposal, earning college-readiness marks on the SAT or ACT could count towards requirements in the future “Indiana GPS Diploma” — a more flexible, personalized version of the current Core 40 diploma.

Nothing proposed has been set in stone yet, however – the rulemaking process to finalize the diploma model is expected to continue for a couple more months. Before the state board takes a final vote – which is anticipated in September — additional rounds of public comment and changes to improve the overall plan are underway.

By law, board members must give their stamp of approval by December. The requirements would then take effect with the Class of 2029.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Indiana Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Niki Kelly for questions: info@indianacapitalchronicle.com. Follow Indiana Capital Chronicle on and .

SPRINGFIELD – When Illinois high school students sit down to take their annual state assessments next year, they will take a different exam than in recent years.

The Illinois State Board of Education recently announced that starting next spring, it will use the ACT exam rather than the SAT.

Both are standardized tests that measure students’ proficiency in core subjects such as English language arts and math. Both are also commonly used for college admissions – although many colleges and universities have stopped requiring them – as well as scholarship applications.

Illinois, however, also uses them as part of the battery of tests schools administer each year to meet federal mandates under the . Results of those tests are reported each year on the  and are used to hold schools and districts accountable for meeting basic academic standards.

Illinois started using the  as the state assessment for 11^th grade students in spring 2017. Two years later, it began using the PSAT 8/9 exam for 9^th grade students and the PSAT 10 for high school sophomores.

At the time, , incorporating a college entrance exam into the state’s annual assessment program was considered a bonus because it gave nearly all graduating high school students a reportable score, paid for by the state, which they could then use for college and scholarship applications.

In recent years, though, many colleges and universities stopped requiring either the SAT or ACT as part of their application and admission processes. 

In 2021, Illinois lawmakers passed the  requiring all public universities and community colleges to adopt a “test-optional” policy for admissions, meaning students could voluntarily choose whether to include them in their application package. But ISBE continued using the tests as part of its federally mandated statewide assessments.

The upcoming switch to the ACT exam came about through ISBE’s routine procurement process. The agency’s contract with the College Board, the nonprofit corporation that operates the SAT, was set to expire on June 30, prompting the agency to open a new bidding process.

The state board agreed to open the bidding process and solicit sealed proposals from testing companies at its regular monthly meeting in September 2023. The decision to award a six-year, $53 million contract to ACT was finalized in May.

According to an  that ISBE has circulated, one of the advantages of switching exams is the ACT includes a science component, whereas the SAT only covered the core subjects of reading, writing and math. That means 11^th grade students will no longer have to take a separate Illinois Science Assessment, thereby reducing overall testing time.

The change also means that students who still want to take the SAT or the PSAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test will have to do so on their own, in addition to the statewide ACT accountability exam. Local schools and districts will have the option of choosing whether to administer those tests during the school day, but the state will not pay for students to take those tests.

 is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service covering state government. It is distributed to hundreds of newspapers, radio and TV stations statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation, along with major contributions from the Illinois Broadcasters Foundation and Southern Illinois Editorial Association.

New standardized test scores for Rhode Island students in grades 3 through 8 made public Wednesday show modest gains in reversing pandemic declines for math and English Language Arts (ELA) proficiency last year.

But improvement at the elementary and middle school levels on the 2023 Rhode Island Comprehensive Assessment System (RICAS) was tempered by PSAT and SAT results for grades 10 and 11 respectively. Nearly half of students taking the SAT last spring met expectations for high school ELA, but slightly more than 25% demonstrated proficiency in math.

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That said, Education Commissioner Angélica Infante-Green still saw cause for celebration in shrinking the gap between the lagging test scores of Rhode Island students with their counterparts in Massachusetts — which leads the nation in math and reading. Since 2018, the performance gap has shrunk from 21% in math to 11% and from 17% to 9% in ELA, according to the new data from the Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE).

“This is the closest we have ever been as a state. That’s pretty amazing,” Infante-Green said during a virtual presentation to share results with reporters Tuesday morning after holding sessions earlier and the previous day with groups of school superintendents.

The data was reviewed by Gov. Dan McKee last Friday. In a statement, McKee said the 2023 RICAS results show Rhode Island schools moving in the right direction to meet his goal of meeting or surpassing Massachusetts’ performance by the year 2030.

“Our students can perform at high levels, and we must stay the course and make sure our school communities have the support and resources to thrive,” McKee said.

A 2022 analysis by the National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment suggested it would take three to five years of accelerated learning for student achievement to return to what it was pre-pandemic. To at least match Massachusetts on test scores, McKee has launched his , which has distributed nearly $3.8 million to communities that signed compacts committing to  creating out-of-school learning opportunities. RIDE was scheduled to hold sessions with city and town officials to review test scores on Wednesday.

The state saw a second year of significant growth in math proficiency with an approximate 2.7 percentage point increase this year, and an increase in English Language Arts (ELA) of approximately 2%.

Among all grades taking the RICAS, fourth graders saw the highest increase in proficiency in both math (from 30.2% to 36.0%) and ELA ( 29.0% to 33.3%)

Fifth grade math proficiency went from 25.9% to 30.0%. Math scores dropped for third graders by half a percentage point to 34.5%

Seventh graders saw a 0.2% drop in ELA proficiency to 29.0%.

Across all racial and ethnic groups, ELA scores increased over last year. In math, all but one racial and ethnic subgroup performed higher. The exception was the Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islanders subgroup which dropped one percentage point, a small demographic of only 93 students, of 0.16% of the 59,272 third through eighth graders tested, Infante-Green said.

Increasing the number of students taking the PSAT and the SAT every April is considered the first step toward ensuring more students are college and career ready.

A total of 9,430 11th graders across the state took the SAT for mathematics, or 94.1%, up from 91.9% in 2022. The lowest rates of participation were at Providence’s Mount Pleasant (81.9%) and Central (82.1%) high schools and Woonsocket High School (82.5%)

The percentage of high school students meeting or exceeding expectations in math on the SAT remained flat statewide at 25.3% while those not meeting expectations increased 1% to 38.5%. In 2022, 30.8% of 11th graders did not meet expectations for math.

A total of 9,384 high school juniors, representing 94.4% of the state’s 11th graders, took the SAT for ELA/Literacy, up from 92.3% in 2022. The new results show 49.1% met or exceeded expectations, up from 47.1%, while 29.1% of students did not meet expectations, down from 30.8% in 2022.

The percentage of high school sophomores taking the PSAT increased over the past year from 90.5% to 92.4% in math and 91.1% to 92.9% in ELA. Statewide math scores dropped from 29.2% proficient in 2022 to 27.2% proficient this year. Statewide ELA results show 55.3% of students met or exceeded expectations, a drop from 59.2% proficient in 2022.

“Those were our kids that were in 8th grade when the pandemic started and we’re seeing that impact,” Infante Green said of high schoolers who had to struggle with the effects of lockdowns and social distancing during a pivotal year in their education and development. “It’s pretty consistent across the nation.”

Results showed a drop in the percentage of students in foster care taking the SAT, from 75.9% in 2022 to 71.8% in 2023, and from 80% to 76.4% who were homeless. The state saw a significant increase in American Indian and Alaskan Islander students taking the SAT, from 83.3% to 88.6%. More students with disabilities also took the SAT from 83.4% to 85.8%.

Multilingual learners

There was a 0.5% increase in multilingual students taking the ACCESS assessment, which tests students in four language domains: listening, reading, speaking, and writing. Student results are categorized in six levels: Entering, Emerging, Developing, Expanding, Bridging and Reaching. The percentage of students scoring at the Expanding and Bridging levels rose 0.3%.

Bright spots

Tiverton saw ELA proficiency rise significantly districtwide, a 10% increase to 47.3%. In Coventry, students proficient in ELA rose 5.2% to 39.2%.Significant gains in ELA proficiency were made at Providence’s Leviton Dual Language School, from 12.3% in 2022 to 29.6% this year; Richmond Elementary School from 49.4% to 66.5%; and Wyman Elementary School in Warwick, 24.7% to 41.7%.Math proficiency increased the most at West Kingston Elementary School in South Kingstown (20.7% to 47.3%); Norwood School in Warwick (18.0% to 38.5%) and Woodridge School in Cranston (31.9% to 48.9%).

RIDE will offer families Personalized Individual Student Reports that include individualized informational  videos accessible through a QR code. The videos are available in 10 languages and help provide insight for comparisons to school, district, and state performance. Examples of the student report videos that families will be able to access and additional informational resources for assessments can be found on .

The , and are among the dozens of schools in the commonwealth that have changed their policies to relax admissions exams requirements.

The test-optional trend is growing as more than 1,800 accredited, four-year colleges and universities nationally have committed to offering ACT/SAT optional or test-free testing policies for fall 2023 applicants, said Harry Feder, executive director of the National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest), which promotes the fair and reasonable assessment of educators, students and school systems.

“I think it’s a recognition by four-year institutions that they don’t get that much additional benefit from administering this test,” Feder said.

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FairTest has been as the number of test takers declines.

In Virginia, 194,909 test takers completed the SAT or a PSAT‐related assessment in 2022, below the 238,500 test takers recorded in 2019.

ACT test-taking also has declined in Virginia to 9% in 2022 compared to 21% in 2019.

Feder said schools that have instituted test-optional policies are seeing an increase in applications and minority applicants.

According to the American Educational Research Journal, from a study of nearly 100 private institutions is that the policy change was connected to a 10 to 12% increase in enrollment of first-time Black, Latinx and Native students, and a 6 to 8% increase in enrollment of first-time students who were women.

Feder also said taking away the admissions exams remove the need for students to be coached and prepared for a test with “absolutely no educational value.”

A pandemic turning point

Colleges and universities for years faced criticism over their admission processes, but the pandemic was a turning point.

After a year or more of learning loss, low-income students and some students of color were scoring low on admission exams and being rejected by colleges despite having performed well in school.

Facing criticism for turning away students on the basis of ACT and SAT scores, colleges began taking a more holistic look at applicants, said Joe DeFilippo, director of academic affairs for the State Council of Higher Education in Virginia.

But the pandemic wasn’t the only factor, he said, noting that studies have shown there will be fewer high school graduates over the next decade and competition is increasing from out-of-state institutions.

“Colleges were a little more desperate for enrollment, and I think that accelerated the thinking of ‘what do we get out of these standardized tests anyway,’” DeFilippo said.

James Madison University changed its admissions exams policies before the pandemic after finding that admissions scores were not a consistent factor in predicting potential academic success, according to Director of Admissions Melinda Wood.

Instead, the admissions exams were potential barriers for prospective students to consider the university.

She said grades in core courses were more relevant for identifying potential academic success. The institution decided to become test-optional in 2018.

“The move to test-optional opened doors for students who may not have otherwise considered applying to JMU,” Wood said.

Since JMU adopted the policy, she said fewer students have elected to submit test scores for consideration. The director said 27% of this year’s applicants provided a test score with their application materials.

Northern Virginia Community College does not require admissions exams, but instead encourages students to seek testing options they see fit for various class levels.

NOVA said admissions exams, including the SAT and ACT, are applied to assess college readiness instead of determining college acceptance. The General Education Development and Virginia Placement Test are other placement options.

“NOVA is an open access institution, which means any person 18 years of age or older who holds a high school diploma or equivalent can enroll in classes,” the school wrote. “We’re proud to offer equitable access to our associate degree and certificate programs.”

Members of the higher education community recommend students research admissions requirements because they vary between colleges.

For example, if a student’s grade point average or class rank meets the minimum requirements at some schools, then SAT or ACT scores are not required to be submitted. Homeschooled or international students, however, are required to take admissions exams regardless of their GPA.

Challenges still loom

Higher education institutions have studied the impact of test-optional policies.

Kelly Slay, an assistant professor of higher education and public policy at Vanderbilt Peabody College, researched how the changes have affected admission officers, who told Slay they are to place students without scores from admissions exams.

Slay did not respond to a request for comment but told the Hechinger Report that admission officers described the experience as “chaotic” and “stressful.”

“One of our key findings were the tensions that were emerging around these test optional policies,” Slay told the Hechinger Report. “There’s a struggle on how to implement them.”

Feder said there are other ways to determine a student’s acceptance based on his conversations with admission officers. , interviews and extracurricular activities are some ways schools look beyond exam results.

“I don’t think they’re a great reflection of what students are ready for and what they’ve already studied because, for one, it’s easy to bomb a test, no matter how much you’ve studied,” said Grace Madison, a homeschooled student in Alexandria.

Madison, who wants to be a teacher at a time when Virginia is to hire more educators amid a teacher shortage, found a school that meets their requirements of affordability and proximity, but traveling to take in-person tests remains a challenge.

The 18-year-old has two blind parents, is fearful of contracting the coronavirus while living with family members who are immunocompromised and suffers from a chronic pain disorder known as fibromyalgia while walking on a limited basis with a cane.

Madison said it’s a challenge for students in situations like theirs to be admitted into college.

“If it were easier to get into college, we’d all like to be teachers and we’d love to do that,” Madison said. “It would mean the world to me if some of those schools dropped those testing requirements because they’ve been a hurdle for a lot of marginalized students like myself for years.”

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Exam-takers averaged 19.8 out of a possible 36 total points on the college admissions test, the first time since 1991 that nationwide results dipped below 20. 

“There is no way to sugar coat these ACT results,” Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, told �鶹��Ʒ. “College entrance exam scores have plummeted, reflecting substantive holes in student knowledge and abilities.”

Scores for students from low-income families were particularly worrisome. Those youth, who in many cases had to pick up part-time jobs during virtual learning or help out with child care, scored 17.4, on average. Only 8% hit college readiness benchmarks in all four subjects — math, reading, English and science — compared to nearly a quarter of their more affluent peers.

Declines can’t be attributed solely to the pandemic, experts say, as ACT scores have been decreasing since 2018. But the pattern has accelerated since COVID hit.

“The magnitude of the declines this year is particularly alarming, as we see rapidly growing numbers of seniors leaving high school without meeting the college-readiness benchmark in any of the subjects we measure,” ACT CEO Janet Godwin said in a .

The numbers provide new insight into the educational harms older learners experienced during the pandemic, said Thomas Dee, professor of education at Stanford University. In early September, the release of 9-year-olds’ reading and math scores via the National Assessment of Educational Progress revealed unprecedented declines in learning among younger students, but until now there’s been less documentation of the impacts for high schoolers, he said.

“​​These latest [ACT] data should remind us to pay attention also to the experiences of recent graduates who spent most of their high school years under pandemic conditions,” Dee wrote in an email.

Samantha Farrow, a senior at Stuyvesant High School in New York City, said the standardized tests she’s taken identified gaps in her learning from the pandemic — Algebra 2 especially, which she took when classes first went online in the spring of 2020. She sat for the SAT rather than the ACT, but said many of her friends took both exams and found them difficult.

“There was still stuff in the SAT, like the Algebra 2 stuff, that I was just like, ‘I have no idea how to do it,’” she said. “I self-studied, too. I used Khan Academy, I did all that stuff. I just didn’t know how to do it. It’s just stuff that we missed.”

The college admissions testing landscape has changed in recent years. About one-third fewer high school grads took the ACT in 2022 than in 2018, as many institutions have become test-optional and an increasing share of young people choose to forgo higher education. Six states — Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nevada, Tennessee and Wyoming — administer the exam to all students.

Amid widespread pandemic disruptions, which hit the most vulnerable students the hardest, declines in ACT results should hardly be unexpected, said Ronn Nozoe, CEO of the National Association of Secondary School Principals. 

“While these scores are alarming, they are certainly not surprising,” he wrote in an email. “School leaders and educators are doing everything they can. … We need our federal leaders to double down on supporting the academic and mental health needs of our students.”

In fact, schools across the country received an unprecedented windfall from the U.S. government’s COVID relief spending, with a total of $190 billion meant to revamp schools’ infrastructure and help students recover from pandemic losses.

“The trick now,” wrote Lake, of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, “is to face up to the enormity and urgency of the challenge while still recognizing that we do have the tools to act now to fix this.”

The digital version of the test will be rolled out internationally in March 2023, while students in the United States will have to wait until March 2024. A pilot of the online test was conducted last fall, with both test takers and administrators largely voicing their approval.

The new testing format will be accompanied by a number of substantive changes. The test will now take roughly two hours to administer, down from approximately three hours for the pencil-and-paper version; students will also receive more time to answer each question. Reading passages will be shortened, with just one question attached to each passage, and calculators will be allowed for all math sections of the test (currently, the math portion includes some “no calculator” sections). 

But according to the College Board’s announcement, some elements of the new SAT will resemble the old: Scores will still be measured on a 1,600-point scale, and the test will be accessed by students at schools or testing centers, rather than at home. 

Most of all, the College Board emphasized, the virtual test would assess the same material, at the same level of rigor, as the SAT does today. The organization’s vice president of college readiness assessments, Priscilla Rodriguez, said in an interview that the benefits of the change lay in “streamlining and simplifying everything around the assessment of reading, writing, and math.”

The digital SAT is “measuring the same skills and knowledge that today’s SAT does, it’s just doing it in a slightly different way,” Rodriguez said. “Students still need to know the core reading, writing and math skills that research shows, again and again, are necessary for career and college readiness.”

The process of simplification could yield some logistical benefits to everyone involved in taking or giving the SAT, according to the College Board. Online test administration will reduce the burden of sorting and shipping test materials and allow students to receive their scores in a matter of days rather than weeks. Schools will also have greater latitude in deciding where and when to administer the exam, which could allow more students to take it.

The new version of the exam received high marks from both students and test proctors in a survey conducted by the College Board, with 100 percent of proctors reporting that their experience administering the digital SAT was either the same or better than its paper-and-pencil equivalent. Eighty percent of student respondents said that the changes made the process of taking the test “less stressful.”

Christal Wang, a junior at Thomas Jefferson High School in Alexandria, Virginia, was part of a randomly selected group of about 500 students in eight countries who took part in the virtual pilot in November. While she did not receive her score from the pilot, Wang said that she found the online test easier than the paper-and-pencil version — which she took in August — because of the changes to the reading portions.

“They removed the long passages that were traditionally in those sections and replaced them with short paragraphs for each question,” she wrote in an email. “I personally liked the digital format more primarily for this reason, because it took less time for each question and it helped me maintain focus.”

But the unveiling of the new format may also raise the question of whether the digital exam is not only easier to take, but also also easier to pass — especially given the pace at which colleges have adopted test-optional admissions requirements during the pandemic.

According to from the Urban Institute, the number of four-year universities featuring test-optional policies has increased from 288 to 927 since the emergence of COVID-19. Harvard, Columbia, and Cornell Universities — among the most prestigious in the world — testing requirements through at least 2024, and several legislatures to make their entire state university systems test optional over the past year.  

At the same time, of the high school class of 2021 sat for the SAT — down 700,000 from the total for the class of 2020.

Rodriguez said that she hoped the alterations to the exam would make it “more approachable” to students, but added that the move online was also the realization of a plan that COVID had accelerated, not originated.

“We’ve been listening for years to students and educators on what it’s like to take or give our test. There are a lot of limitations to being a highly secure, paper-and-pencil test that circles the globe, and we’re able to break a lot of those limitations by going digital.”