As the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) seeks to align itself more fully with national Common Core Standards, it will no longer administer the Prairie State Achievement Exam (PSAE) to all high school juniors across the state.

In the wake of state legislation passed in July, the PSAE, composed of a one day ACT test and a second day of workplace-oriented WorkKeys testing, has been eliminated from the state’s standardized testing requirements, leaving students and school administrators with a degree of uncertainty regarding college entrance exams.

“There is a whole litany of things regarding testing that could impact our students,” Superintendent Dr. Timothy Kilrea said. “To change the assessment structure midstream, I don’t necessarily think is a good option for our students, but the situation is better than it was a year ago because the state is now providing an ACT test for all juniors, which was not part of the state’s original plan.”

While a free ACT will no longer be offered as a component of the PSAE, the state will still provide a free ACT test to school districts throughout the state, including LT, on March 3.

Despite this year’s situation, the continuation of offering a state-funded ACT to all juniors in the state may only last through this school year, Director of Curriculum and Instruction Scott Eggerding said.

While the March ACT will still provide all juniors throughout the state with the opportunity to assess their college preparedness regardless of their financial status, the test will be given nearly two months before the usual April 23, 24 dates of the PSAE.

The earlier date of the ACT will limit the time students have to prepare for the ACT, and will also throw off the scheduling of ACT prep classes offered through the school, Kilrea said.

“I don’t believe the situation is optimal for our students,” Kilrea said. “I believe the state should continue to provide an ACT test to all juniors because that is the test that colleges and universities use for admission purposes, and our students see as relevant to the next step in their educational careers.”

The test that will replace the PSAE as the state-mandated standardized test is the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) test.

Designed to conform to the higher standards established by Common Core, the PARCC test will allegedly offer students a more interactive approach to standardized testing through its computer-based administration.

Despite the possibilities this new test claims to offer students, the way it will be administered at LT still remains uncertain, Eggerding said.

If LT can give students a paper version of the PARCC test, the entirety of the test would take a portion of nine school days during the second semester, Eggerding said. However, if the state requires that LT administer the online portion of the test, testing would last much longer, as the school does not have a computer for every student that would be testing.

In order to accommodate for the uncertainty surrounding test administration, LT has based the school calendar around the scenario in which testing would last longest.

“As of last spring, the State Board of Education had not developed a concrete plan for school assessment for 2014-2015, so we built this year’s school calendar based on the doomsday testing scenario, so no matter the end result, LT will be able handle it,” Kilrea said. “We are still waiting for the State Board to provide a clear picture as to how the state assessments will work for this school year.”

One proposed method for administering the test over an extended period has been a series of extended late start days on which those students who are required to test come in early, and those students who are not affected come to school later; however, no clear consensus has been reached due to a lack of information surrounding the test.

“There a lot of little issues with the administration of the test that we still have to figure out and the state hasn’t given us quite enough information on how to handle that yet,” Eggerding said.