The Educational Testing service, which for many years formulated and administered SAT exams, has acquired ACT, Inc., including the ACT test. Higher Ed Dive has the story:

[Excerpts]

Educational nonprofit ETS is acquiring ACT — roughly two years after the standardized test maker was taken over by a private equity firm.

The deal will create a testing giant reaching 35 million people every year and comes as several universities announce a return to requiring standardized tests for admissions.

Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. The deal was expected to close on July 1, according to an ETS spokesperson.

Los Angeles-based Nexus Capital Management acquired ACT in 2024, converting the nonprofit college admissions assessment organization into a for-profit company in the process. Following the deal, ACT became part of a public benefit corporation majority-owned by Nexus that also included an enrollment management subsidiary called Encoura. The latter is not part of the ETS deal.

ETS owns the GRE and the TOEFL English assessment and until 2024 it administered the College Board’s SAT, the other behemoth in the college readiness field.

[ETS CEO Amit] Sevak told Higher Ed Dive his organization approached Nexus about acquiring ACT. ETS saw the acquisition as a chance to obtain a widely known brand as it looks to expand and address sagging confidence in educational institutions, Sevak said. “We initiated the discussions as an opportunity for us to bring forward our mission to the country.”

The nonprofit ETS plans to keep the ACT pieces for-profit for now. But Sevak said ETS will operate ACT as a mission-focused organization, adding that ETS could eventually change the company’s legal status.

ETS plans to invest in some of ACT’s products. But with the deal still very fresh, leaders still need to forge detailed plans, Sevak said. “We’re really interested in the opportunity to take some of their products and think about how we could take them to the next level,” he said.

ACT CEO Steve Tapp said in a statement that the combination “will allow us to take what we’ve built and scale it within a broader vision for readiness.”

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has taken a keen interest in standardized test requirements. In the White House’s proposed compact with colleges — a deal that would give institutions preferential treatment in research grants in return for adopting a broad suite of administration-preferred policies — included a standardized testing admissions requirement. None of the major research institutions invited to sign the compact have done so..

Sevak sees all of these discussions as opportunities for ETS and ACT.

He described bias-testing for large-scale tests as part of the “secret sauce” of his organization. “One of the key ways that we do that is around measuring subgroups,” he said, describing a process for testing new questions with different demographic subgroups before being added broadly to their products.

ETS also uses technology and artificial intelligence to root out bias in its tests, with human oversight to ensure the AI isn’t biased in turn, according to Sevak. He said that experience can help to ensure fairness in the ACT’s test.

“It’s a highly automated process at ETS,” Sevak said. “It’s a big part of what we’ve been investing in the last couple of years.”

 
Smithsonian magazine takes a look at the status of the SAT on its 100th anniversary. The article gives a good overview of the history of the test as well as the current controversies regarding the continued use of the SAT.

[Excerpts]

On June 23, 1926, more than 8,000 high school students sat down to take the first version of what was then called the Scholastic Aptitude Test, or the SAT.

Now, a century later, around two million graduating high school students in the United States—more than half—take the SAT each year. The test has morphed several times over its history, as researchers, educators and the public have pushed for it to assess skills learned in school rather than inherent intelligence or rote memorization.

But higher education has been inching away from entrance exams. Less than 10 percent of U.S. institutions that grant bachelor’s degrees require a score from the SAT, or its fellow ACT test, for the fall 2026 admissions cycle. That’s largely because of the Covid-19 pandemic’s lingering effects. However, decades-long arguments over what the test scores truly reflect and whether they’re accurate predictors of college success have made people question their role in admissions.

“In the narrowest sense, the [SAT’s] role is simply to provide a measure of verbal and math skills needed in college,” says Rebecca Zwick, an education expert who retired from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

“But, of course, its role has expanded to mean a lot more things. Some people view it as the embodiment of the meritocracy, and then others think it’s a tool for social stratification,” adds Zwick, who also worked for 25 years at the Educational Testing Service (ETS), which was formerly responsible for the administration of the SAT. The test is owned by the nonprofit College Board.

As we enter a new SAT era, many people are wondering whether the test will make a triumphant return as a requirement for college admissions, and if, instead of just weeding out applicants, it could better help universities meet students where they are.

The College Board devotes plenty of resources to what’s called predictive validity, examining whether the SAT truly measures what it’s supposed to: college readiness. The board’s recent reports indicate that SAT scores, especially when combined with high school grade point average, or GPA, are predictive of cumulative college GPA across four years, as well as bachelor’s degree completion within four years. The correlations hold when the data is divided by student demographics, including underrepresented minorities, first-generation college students and individuals whose first language isn’t English, although degree completion rates tended to be slightly lower for those groups compared with the overall numbers.

That’s consistent with past research. Based on self-reported data, “the SAT does predict first year GPA pretty well,” says Fred Oswald, a psychologist at UC Irvine. Although some experts argue that predictive power drops in later years, he adds, “the first year is highly consequential for being able to stay in school.”

The College Board also conducts intense internal and external analyses of new test questions to make sure the SAT is fair, meaning that certain types of students don’t score significantly higher than others. For instance, an infamous analogy question referenced a regatta, which students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, and more likely to be of a racially minoritized group, may have never heard of.

In addition to educational opportunities and obstacles, a student’s verbal and math abilities can be influenced by personal characteristics, Oswald says. A love of writing short stories or a passion for construction projects that require geometry might give a student an edge. And being able to afford SAT tutoring and to take the test multiple times is known to elevate scores on the coachable exam. Because of this, the College Board has put out free test-prep resources.

That’s why a test score alone—even from the SAT, one of the most “rigorously developed tests”—can’t determine college readiness, Oswald says. Instead, admissions officers should be using it as “a piece of information to be considered alongside other pieces,” such as a high school transcript, writing assignments and extracurricular activities.

“Ultimately, you have to compare one student to another when making admissions decisions, and the SAT provides some comparative information,” Oswald says.

Dozens of universities, including MIT, Purdue, Stanford and the University of Florida, have reinstated entrance exam requirements since the height of the pandemic. But will the higher education system experience a huge swing back to an SAT mandate?

“I think, for the time being, we’ve reached a kind of equilibrium,” says Harry Feder, executive director of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing (FairTest). He and some of the other experts who spoke with Smithsonian magazine suspect that certain elite schools might return to requiring test scores but that many will remain optional in the short term.

Others think that the SAT will make a comeback in a world with rising high school grade inflation and the pervasive use of artificial intelligence for classwork.

Kindergarten through 12th grade teachers surveyed by NPR and the polling firm Ipsos believe that A.I. is affecting students’ critical-thinking skills, according to results released earlier this month. Most respondents see the technology as a shortcut for kids to avoid schoolwork and say that it’s making it harder for educators to assess students’ knowledge.

The SAT, by contrast, says the College Board’s Rodriguez, is “a way for a student to raise their hand and say, ‘Here’s what I can do.’”

Many colleges, however, are now facing another crisis: whether they can admit enough undergraduates to stay open. Between 2010 and 2021, the number of students enrolled at degree-granting institutions in the U.S. fell by 15 percent, largely because of a “demographic cliff”—a declining U.S. birth rate since 2007.

Loosening admissions requirements might be one way for struggling higher education institutions to keep going, says historian Thelin, although he suspects it’s too late for that, as many students today consider options outside of traditional colleges.

“All colleges are going to have to work harder” at attracting students, he adds, but the key will be student retention. “I think that’s where they’re going to increasingly put their attention and resources.”