Time Of Change For College Application Testing

It's a time of change for college application testing. Students taking the ACT in Fall 2015 will need to prepare for a more complex essay and some alterations to the Reading and Mathematics tests. These changes will be minor compared to the College Board's plans for an extensive redesign of the SAT in 2016. 

Here are the basics regarding the Fall 2015 ACT: 

Students taking the optional essay will encounter a more complex writing prompt that requires them to evaluate multiple perspectives on a complex issue and generate their own analysis based on reasoning, knowledge, and experience.
Writing test scoring will be updated to include subscores in four areas: ideas and analysis, development and support, organization, and language use.
The Reading test will introduce a new question type, asking students to compare information from paired passages, similar to the SAT.
The Mathematics section will see a slight increase in statistics and probability.
New supplemental scores in STEM (short for science, technology, engineering and math), Language Arts, Career Readiness and Text Complexity align to the Common Core standards. The ACT's traditional 1-36 composite score will not change; these new scores will be provided in addition to the current provided scores.