ACT Eliminates $50 Essay Rescore Service

ACT, Inc appears to have discontinued its ACT essay rescoring service. No longer can students put up $50 to have their essay rescored in hopes of receiving a higher score. Rescoring never resulted in a lower score and the $50 was returned if the score increased upon review, so this was a low-risk way for students in the know (and with $50 laying around) to seek higher scores. 

ACT's score report services indicates that students can no longer directly challenge the legitimacy of their essay readers' scores. Instead, the Score Verification Service will simply confirm that ACT followed its own rules and didn't mis-scan the essay. "ACT will verify that your essay was scored by at least two independent, quali?ed readers and by a third reader in the event that the two scores differed by more than one point in any domain. ACT will also verify that your essay was properly captured and displayed to readers." The essay would only be rescored if the verification reveals procedural missteps. ACT has knocked 20% off its fee; the essay verification service can be yours today for only $40.*

ACT's essay rescoring policy was never a good idea. Given the absurdity of Writing grading, lots of refunds were given. The score changes were embarrassing to ACT and were clearly not helping the bottom line. It seemed inevitable that ACT would eventually adopt the "All Scores Final" policy of the College Board on the SAT Essay.  The policy was indefensible, in that while it arguably corrected the most minor of injustices for the advantaged, it added to the pile of injustices for the disadvantaged.

Essay rescoring *was* useful in one sense: It put the lie to assertions that the scoring of these standardized timed "writing" tasks is reliable enough relative to the exercise's value. What does it say about a test's reliability and fairness if individual testers can challenge their score's legitimacy for a fee and often prevail? However, that argument against the essay scoring methodology is made easily enough anyway. 

The elimination of rescoring follows the abandonment of the 36 scale for the essay, announced a few months ago. While these changes are fairly inconsequential or superficial in nature, ACT's responsiveness to criticism is commendable nevertheless. We would like to see more transparency in the discussion of standardized writing exams and how they can most responsibly be used in college admission decisions. We view it as a positive that less than 15% of colleges are requiring ACT Writing from the class of 2017 and that even those requiring the essay appear to put little weight on it, as the nature of Writing scores means that the distinctions between applicants rarely have meaning. We encourage colleges requiring the ACT or SAT essay to continue to evaluate its usefulness internally and to clarify externally their rationale for requiring it.

Meanwhile, ACT (and College Board) would aid the conversation by acknowledging more openly that the real target is the state and district marketplace. The difference between a 7 and an 8 on the essay might not indicate much about an individual student, but if one large high school in a district averages 7.2 and another averages 7.8, the difference is significant. Domain scores may be able to tell state departments of education how their teachers and students are performing in in different curricular areas. Increasingly, states and districts are paying for students to take the ACT (or SAT) in order to make all students “college ready” or to fulfill testing mandates. ACT and College Board view this as a growth opportunity that potentially extends across all of K-12. Their successful pursuit of this opportunity need not rely on propping up the essay as useful in individual admission decisions. 

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* For the multiple-choice portions of the test, score verification is another $50 and all that is promised is that "ACT will verify that your responses were checked against the correct score key." We find this baffling. Who could imagine that a test could ever be scored with the wrong key? College Board's hand-scoring service explicitly states that an obvious error in mis-bubbling, i.e. being one row off in recording answers on an entire section, could be manually corrected. It's unclear whether ACT just isn't fully describing what might be done or is ACT's verification strictly limited to confirmation that they (ACT) didn't make a mistake.