The Putnam County School System (PCSS) will move to online ACT testing starting in spring 2023. The ACT announced that testing would move online completely by fall 2023 with school districts across Tennessee. 

“The ACT gave the option for spring testing to be taken online with the full transition to online testing by fall 2023. We opted to go ahead and implement the spring online testing to allow students to begin getting used to taking the test online. As those students enter their senior year, they will be more familiar with the ACT online testing process,” said Jason Stickler, PCSS Testing and Data/ESSER Supervisor. 

Current PCSS 11th-grade students will take the ACT online assessment during the testing window on March 21-23 and March 28-30, 2023.

Prior to this change, ACT conducted a mode comparability study and found that there are many advantages to testing online, including:

•  Increased possibility of greater performance (especially in English, reading, and writing).

• Movement through the test more efficiently, leading to fewer unanswered questions, especially in English and Reading.

•  Decreased “item omit rate” (students were more likely to submit answers for scoring, thus increasing the number of correct answers used for final score calculation).

PCSS is encouraged by the research conducted by ACT.  In addition to these positive findings, several other benefits exist:

• A quicker overall return rate of student scores

• Format alignment to PCSS’s ACT prep assessment platform (CERT).  Both platform assessments (ACT and CERT) will be conducted online.

ACT senior retake assessments will still be offered in the fall, and students will take all ACT assessments at their assigned school.

Additional Information about the ACT assessment can be found at https://www.act.org/content/act/en/products-and-services/state-and-district-solutions/tennessee.html