Boomer is my puppy Golden Retriever. When the weather warmed up, it was time to introduce him to the pool. It’s in his DNA to like the water, but he didn’t know that. In fact, he didn’t know that he inherently knew how to swim. His first attempts were awkward, to say the least. He excessively kicked and sputtered and generally looked as if he might drown.
As I watched Boomer one day flailing in the pool with a terrified look on his face, I couldn’t help but think about ACT and the College Board. They, too, appear to be flailing while trying desperately not to drown. ACT and the College Board added dates to their fall testing schedule in an attempt to accommodate the thousands of students who had had their test dates canceled in the spring and summer. Fall registration opened Monday at ACT, and by 3:00 Eastern time, they had tweeted, “We are in the process of soft-launching a new registration system, which is experiencing some performance issues due to unusually high demand. We are working diligently to improve the experience for all users.” Two hours later they took the registration page down. In July they had to apologize to the students who were not given advanced warning that their test centers were closed; those students discovered that when they showed up to take the test. This follows their decision to postpone the online testing they had promised until 2021. Also, ACT’s system is set up so that if your test is canceled, you still have to pay to register for a new date. They say your original money will be refunded in 3-5 business days. Does that sound like drowning to you? It does to me. It is not their fault, of course, that the pandemic is forcing last minute closures of testing centers, but decisions such as launching a new untried portal on a day that predictably would have an unprecedented number of users, reveal an industry in utter turmoil.
