ACT marks 50 years

Fifty years after 75,000 high school students took its initial college admission test, ACT Inc. is serving millions of people each year.

University of Iowa faculty members Everett Lindquist and Ted McCarrel launched the American College Testing Program at a meeting Aug. 21, 1959, in the Old Capitol on the University of Iowa Pentacrest. From only a few employees, ACT (the name was changed in 1996) has grown to more than 1,250 full-time employees worldwide, according to Scott Gomer, director of media relations.

At the time the non-profit ACT began, he said, there was only one national college-entrance testing program - the Scholastic Aptitude Test or SAT.

“The SAT focused on identifying the most academically able students for admission to the nation's colleges and universities,” he said. “The remaining college students were admitted either on the basis of scores earned on entrance exams offered by individual states or colleges, or on the basis of family ties.”

The ACT assessment is designed to serve two purposes:

• Help students make better decisions about what colleges to attend and which programs to study.
• Provide helpful information to colleges for admitting students and ensuring their success after enrollment.

“The ACT provides information that colleges can use to place students in the right courses,” Gomer said.

That data replaced information from testing that had been done after admission - a costly process, Gomer said, that ate up valuable freshman year time for students.

In addition, data from so many years of testing high school and college students have allowed ACT to develop college readiness bench marks.

“If someone performed fairly well in college algebra, we looked at their score on the ACT,” Gomer said. “... The students who achieve that score or higher have roughly a 75 percent chance of earning a C or better in that first-year college course or a 50-50 chance of getting a B or better.

“Will that apply to all students? No, but students with those scores technically have the academic skills to succeed.”

In the late 1980s, ACT turned its attention to the nation's workplace, beginning development of WorkKeys, a job skills assessment system that measures real-world skills.

WorkKeys measures three primary cognitive abilities in applicants: applied mathematics, reading for information and finding information, Gomer said. Then the company developed more than 16,600 job profiles using the same approach, so a pre-certified applicant could be matched with a specific position.

The job profiles are ranked upward from bronze to silver to gold to platinum. The score of an applicant's test puts him or her in one of those categories. So if an employer wanted a platinum-level skill set, an applicant scoring in the bronze range would be the wrong fit.

Since ACT rolled out WorkKeys in 1992, it has become the gold standard in skills testing. Thousands of companies worldwide use WorkKeys to evaluate applicants or determine whether an employee has the skills for a promotion.

In fall 2006, ACT expanded the WorkKeys assessment to provide insights into areas such as a job candidate's dependability, openness and tendency toward risky behaviors.

Richard Ferguson, ACT chairman and chief executive officer, said the tests examine personal qualities such as attitudes and behavioral tendencies that also influence how a person fits in a job.

“Our data showed that far too many people were entering the work force with gaps between their skills and behavioral characteristics needed for the job,” Ferguson said.

In 2002, ACT acknowledged its growing role in supporting education and the work force by creating two divisions - education and work force development.

Three years later, ACT International was created. ACT has offices in Sydney, Australia; Seoul, South Korea; Shanghai, China; Madrid, Spain, and Singapore. ACT's U.S. operations are headquartered at its corporate campus off North Dodge Street in Iowa City.

While ACT has diversified its services along with its reach since 1959, Gomer said its focus has remained relatively unchanged.

“Our mission statement says we will help people achieve education and workplace success,” he said. “Everything we do is based on data and research.

“Last year, we had 1.4 million high school graduates who took the ACT - that's a lot of data that can be used to help students succeed.”