Students will be taking a variety of state tests from morning to mid-day at West Chicago Community High School on Thursday April 18 and Friday April 19 2024.
Students in grade 11 will be partaking in the SAT and the Illinois Science Assessment (ISA) on both Thursday and Friday. Freshman will be taking the PSAT on Thursday, and sophomores take the PSAT on Friday. Seniors have both days off.
Students participating in the tests should have received an email containing their testing room number, where they must report at 7:55 am, a reminder to bring their fully charged Chromebook, and a slip of paper from their Den teacher containing their sign-in information. The email also reminds students to not bring their phones, any drinks other than water, and to bring snacks, or to get breakfast from the free cart the morning of.
“April 12th and 13th are important days for West Chicago Community High School students as state tests will be administered to all freshmen, sophomores, and juniors. Student attendance is required for these testing dates,” Communication and Community Relations Coordinator Brittney Walker said via email.
Although the test evaluates intelligence, the test itself will be taken differently this year. The past few years, College Board has been pushing the SAT to be online, just like AP exams. The entire test being online will take away a bunch of wasted time and effort for graders, like the Scantron machine.
“[So]They’re basically taking the bubble sheets or whatever, putting them into some Scantron machine, and the Scantron machine is basically, you know, it’s eliminating a whole lot of work. So that’s part of it,” Dave Clarke said.
Students have concerns about the Wi-Fi connection during the test, and if WeGo is capable of that many computers working at once. Since the freshman and sophomores are divided, it also makes it easier for the internet to not fail.
“So we’ve done full testing in the field house, so we’ve had situations where we’ve had five, six, seven hundred people testing at the same time. We basically have enough bandwidth in the school, which basically means we have enough internet space, if you will,” Clarke said.
Saucer-looking things on the ceiling are access points for computers and phones to hook up to easily. The technology team has little-to-no concern about the internet connection. But, students also are curious as to if the class of 2026 will be taking the SAT or the ACT in the next year.
“[But] I have heard that though. So we switched that, I think we’re switching back or something along those lines,”Clarke said.
Students are also able to receive their results a lot sooner, instead of July or August, they’re capable of getting them in early to mid June. Also, since technology has grown so much, students get a more precise and accurate score.
“There’s also less errors, like if you know, when you involve humans into things, there’s an error…So they try to eliminate people out of some of that stuff,” Clarke said.
