COMPASS/ESL Internet Version Helps Colleges Point Students
in the Right Direction

ACT’s COMPASS/ESL program helps colleges:

• Correctly place students in appropriate entry-level reading, writing, and math courses
• Diagnose specific skill deficiencies for remedial work
• Pinpoint the abilities of students whose first language is not English
• Assess writing proficiency

More than 1,000 colleges used it to assess 1.2 million students last year. This year, a new Internet version will offer colleges more capabilities.

In addition to its long-standing features, COMPASS/ESL for the Internet will allow colleges to:

• Test students in remote locations
• Customize the messages that students see on their score reports
• Conduct outreach programs in feeder high schools to help prepare students appropriately for college-level work
• Test students at multiple sites
• Use data more effectively through improved database and reporting capabilities
• Automatically direct students whose writing scores fall into specified ranges to the e-Write evaluation for further assessment

“They have more capabilities at the same price,” said Roth.

The Internet version also lowers on-campus technical support requirements, even as ACT extends its technical support to 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The two versions of COMPASS/ESL—one for the Internet and one for Microsoft Windows®-based networks—test students comparably. Schools may choose to use both versions. The Windows version might still be used in a computer lab or testing center, for example, while the Internet version would allow a college to test a newly accepted student three states away before she arrives on campus. The data from any Windows-version administrations of COMPASS/ESL can be imported to the Internet-version database to maintain one complete dataset for the college.

“It makes everybody happy. The college can enroll the new student in appropriate classes in a timely manner, and the student can go to a location near home to test rather than spend a lot of money to travel to a campus just for placement purposes,” said Roth.

No matter where students physically take the test, they log into the version that has been customized by their own schools, so they see the messages pertinent to their campuses and their programs.

“The score report is vital,” Roth said. “That is where you get the very best messages in front of the students.”

Customizable score reports are particularly useful in colleges’ outreach efforts. Eighty percent of the schools that use COMPASS/ESL are community colleges. Because they almost invariably draw most of their students from their own areas, they are able to develop customized outreach programs to their local high schools. With COMPASS/ESL for the Internet, they can establish a remote testing center in a high school and tailor the messages that students see on their score reports to help them make wise course selections while they are still in high school.

“Basically the outreach programs help the high schoolers be ready for the college’s coursework when they get there, and eliminate some of the need for remedial work, which, again, makes for a more successful student and a more successful college,” said Roth.

Outreach programs are made possible by the new feature that allows a college to establish any number of test centers. No longer constrained by the reach of a local area network, any site with Internet access can become a testing center.

All of a school’s data are stored on ACT’s secure servers, so the dataset for all its test-takers is always complete and available for research or outreach efforts, no matter how many separate testing locations a school operates. The software offers several standard reports, or colleges may export data to another database program for further manipulation. In this way, schools can target specific students with opportunities that might benefit them. They might prepare a mailing to inform students with low-end reading skills of a special reading workshop, for example.

In some cases, COMPASS/ESL scores indicate skill deficiencies that require further investigation right away. As has always been the case, such students can take the COMPASS/ESL diagnostic assessments, which help educators and students zero in on specific skills that need more work. A student with a low general reading score, for example, might then take the reading diagnostic test to recognize a weakness in inferring the meanings of words. Then the report can direct the student to specific resources on campus to build that skill.

Colleges have always had the option of requiring their students to take the e-Write COMPASS/ESL test, although it was an either/or proposition—either all of their students took the directed writing assessment or none of them did. The new Internet version of COMPASS/ESL allows schools to designate a range of scores within which test-takers are automatically directed to the e-Write assessment for further evaluation of their skills.