EGDYMUHKAYSHUNAL TESTING SIRVISS AKWIRES ACT

Before we get to today's blog, remember this Friday we DO have a vidchat at 2PM US Central. So remember to get your questions and comments to me by no later than 10PM This Thursday evening, one page, and to put VIDCHAT QUESTIONS in the subject header of your email. As always remember to keep an eye on the forum for any last minute schedule changes but we are not anticipating any.

Now to today's blog:

Yes, you read that headline correctly, but in case you're a recent graduate from any Amurikuhn quackademy, you probably know how to spell properly and may be somewhat mystified as to what the headline is trying to communicate, so permit me to translate the blog headline from edublather (of the blither dialect) back into standard American English: The Educational Testing Service, owner of the popular SAT standardized tests, has acquired rival testing platform, ACT, according to this story shared (with our thanks) by E.O.:

ETS Acquires Standardized Test Provider ACT

Notably, the acquisition comes at a very peculiar time, according to the headline that immediately follows:

The acquisition comes amid growing demand for skills-based assessments and declining participation rates for traditional standardized tests.

With that caveat and what it might portend, I need to take my usual run to the end of the twig of the high octane speculation tree for my typical Wile E. Coyote plunge into Speculation Canyon.  Most readers of my book with my co-author Gary Lawrence, Rotten to the (Common) Core will be familiar with our deep-seated opposition to standardized tests. As we argued there, following the critique of mathematician Banesh Hoffman, standardized tests are not a measure of performance, as they typically punish the more gifted student. Banesh wrote articles and even a book about the subject back during the 1950s and 1960s, and ended up painting the "experts" of the Educational Testing Service - the "edugarchy" as we called them - into corner after corner. Rather, Hoffman argued that standardized tests are only measures of conformity, not of an ability to think independently and critically, nor, more importantly, of the ability to create new syntheses from old data, a key requirement on any graduate or post-graduate program (at least, it was back when the quackademy was actually functioning correctly).

The article makes it clear that declining participation rates in these (wretched) standardized tests is one reason for the merger, and that to some extent, the covid plamscamdemic acted as a catalyst to accelerate a process of abandonment already under way:

The deal is the latest move by both ETS and ACT to grow their presence in the skills-based credentialing market amid the rise of test-optional college admissions policies first put in place during the pandemic. While colleges and universities have used both the SAT and ACT to help assess an applicant’s aptitude for success for decades, during the 2026 admissions cycle fewer than 10 percent of bachelor’s degree–granting institutions required applicants to submit ACT or SAT scores.

Both tests have seen declining participation rates in the 2020s.

In 2025, only 1.38 million students took the ACT, compared to 1.78 million in 2019. That drop in demand led the ACT to lay off more than 100 employees in 2023 and sell the nonprofit to the private equity firm Nexus Capital Management the next year. At the time, Janet Godwin, then CEO of ACT, said the purchase was aimed at doubling down on assessing “college and career readiness” and reaching a wider pool of learners, job seekers and employers.

One might be tempted to view all of this as a positive development. After all, after pouring billions of dollars into a broken and unfixable system and watching test scores plummet on tests that only measure the ability to conform to begin with, maybe people are waking up.

But there's something else in the article that should give one pause, and that "something else" is the subject and theme of today's high octane speculation:

In addition to administering its namesake college admissions exam—which 36 percent of high school graduates took in 2025—ACT also provides career-planning tools and operates ACT WorkKeys, a workforce skills assessment system that awards the National Career Readiness Certificate, used by thousands of U.S. employers to evaluate workplace competencies.

...

In the meantime, ETS has been going all in on developing career-readiness assessments.

Last fall it launched FutureNav Compass, which allows students to complete assessments of their skills—including hard-to-measure soft skills, like communication, resilience and ability to collaborate—and present a “skills-based transcript” to employers. This spring, ETS also announced that it will play a role in developing assessments for the forthcoming Khan TED Institute, which aspires to soon offer an artificial intelligence–focused degree that’s cheaper and faster than similar degrees offered at traditional colleges and universities.

ETS’s acquisition of ACT this week is yet another signal that there’s growing demand for more detailed, candidate-specific assessments, said Michael Nettles, a professor of psychometrics at Morgan State University and former chair of policy evaluation and research at ETS.

In our book, Lawrence and I pointed out that the goal of the Educational Testing Service, and especially of its founder, Henry Chauncy, was to create a whole series of tests that not only would "slot" students into various programs that the tests determined they were suited for, but that further tests could be developed to slot them into various jobs after graduation. The goal, in other words, was to create a veritable plague of tests that, like swarms of locusts would follow a person for the rest of his life. Imagine the situation: say you've spent your whole academic career becoming a commercial artist, and you've had some success at it and have acquired over time a relatively good portfolio of work. You then apply for a position at a corporation, only to be told that you're not suited for the position because your test scores indicate that you'd be much better shoving shinola at a government bureaucracy, the Shinola Heaving Institution of Technocracy. The insincerely smiling conformist bureaucrat reviewing your application adds "Of course, you're free to pursue any career you think is most appropriate, but I'm afraid our guidelines are very strict, and we cannot deviate from the scores." And of course, it will only be a matter of a few years that the "suggestions" of the scores will become the mandated requirements of action by the force of "law".

Which brings us to our high octane speculation of the day, for such life-long shadowing - such surveillance - was the chief goal and objective of the whole Common Core agenda, which was to create a series of standardized adaptable computerized tests that would track a student throughout their entire career. The career placement tests alluded to in the article are merely the follow-up post-student phase for surveillance and control, the necessary step to create the surveillance state by requiring people, first by corporate "policy" and then by force of law, to take a career placement and assessment test every few years: to submit to more surveillance. Couple this conformity to the disbursement of student financial aid - of money - and you get the idea.

And for all of that, they will need a lot of data centers, region by region, to track their slaves. After all, you are their ultimate investment. You are their capital, and they will need a system to keep track of the inventory...

See you on the flip side...

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