Students who experienced a disruption to the ACT on April 8 will be allowed a free retake on June 14 or July 12 at Niles North. Juniors are eligible for a free ACT retake voucher to use this summer. The form must be submitted on Monday, April 28.
According to an email reply from ACT’s public relations department, these technical issues were caused by a screen in the ACT coordinator application taking an unexpectedly long time to load, causing some of the ACT servers to malfunction. As a result, some coordinators were delayed in starting exams, and others could not move students to the next section of the exam. They deployed additional server capacity within 45 minutes of the issue starting.
Math teacher Andrew Roche proctored one of the exams where students experienced technical difficulties.
“The group of students that I was in charge of sat there and waited for a little over an hour before we could finally get the test started. We were supposed to start the test no later than 8:30 a.m., and we didn’t start until after 9:30 a.m. It is unfair because you have students taking a test that they’ve been told is gonna make a big impact on their life,” Roche said.
Students across Illinois were affected. The ACT organization allowed districts to schedule their testing within a two-week test window (e.g., April 8-April 18). Of the nearly 397,000 students scheduled to test in this window, approximately 11,000 students, around three percent, started but were unable to finish testing the same day.
As a result of the challenges students faced, many were not in the right mental head space to perform well.
“The time it took to run around for 30 minutes trying to figure out where I was supposed to be, and then waiting another 20 in the Lit. Center because no one knew what was happening was mentally drianing and if I were to take the test on that day, I wouldn’t have performed as well because it took so long that the stress of running around didn’t promise my top performance,” junior Sophie Gardner said.
Many schools were able to resume testing on April 8, but other schools decided to reschedule testing.
“The vast majority of Illinois schools opted to resume testing the same day, with over 38,500 ACT with Writing tests completed statewide on April 8, and 22,000 PreACT Secure or PreACT 9 Secure tests completed. Others opted to reschedule testing, whether that was the next day, the next week, or in our next test window (April 22 – May 2),” ACT said.
The score from the retake exam will not replace the score that students earned on April 8. Students will be able to access scores on the MyACT account.
“If you connect the April exam to your MyACT account and sign up for one of these summer exams, both scores will be viewable in your MyACT account. Completing this form (ACT retake form) does NOT officially register you for the ACT. It simply lets us know which date you are interested in and which date you prefer,” superintendent Steve Parnther said in an email to junior students and families.
ACT apologizes for the disruption and knows the impact that any technical issues have on schedules, student experience and instructional time.
“It’s important for us to acknowledge that testing is always stressful, and that student and school schedules are always full. We regret this disruption and will make sure we’re continually improving the testing experience for Illinois students and educators moving forward,” ACT said.
