By Zach Schermele for TeenVogue
About two months after taking the June ACT test on a Saturday morning in Everett, Washington, 40 high schoolers received a nightmarish email: Their exams had been lost, the email said; they had never even made it to the scoring center. Some students and parents felt cheated.
The situation was “tremendously frustrating,” one parent told the Seattle Times, adding that the mistake had the potential of “altering the trajectory of kids’ lives.”
According to an ACT spokesperson, the tests were finally located, on August 21. But just two days earlier, reports circulated that another 18 students who had also taken the June exam, this time in Atmore, Alabama, had been notified their answer sheets were lost in the mail as well. The tests had been picked up by FedEx, ACT’s exclusive shipping company, but never arrived at ACT facilities. The mother of one student told NorthEscambia.com that the mishap forced her daughter to miss the deadline to apply for a four-year scholarship..
Earlier this year a similar situation played out in central New Jersey: 40 students who had taken the April ACT test at Edison High School found out, in June, that their answer sheets were missing. The forms were supposed to be inside packages with the exams, an ACT spokesperson tells Teen Vogue, but they weren’t; the tests remain lost and un-scored.
These are just the latest in a string of incidents over the past decade in which ACT exams have been misplaced, delayed, or never sent to the right place. Regardless of who shoulders the blame, the result is often the same: Students who had worked hard to perform on yet another standardized test are left with no way to prove it. ACT does provide free retakes to students whose tests get lost, but a second chance isn’t the only thing these students are worried about.
“It has completely complicated my schedule and timeline for college applications,” says Lindsay Douglass, a senior at Pinecrest High School in Southern Pines, North Carolina. Earlier this year it was revealed that the February and March ACT tests of 440 students — the entire junior class at Pinecrest — had been lost. The answer sheets were never located. An internal investigation concluded the incident was caused by “human error,” according to the school’s website, and a timeline of events released by the school district shows one of its employees was terminated two days after the school opened its internal investigation.
“[T]hat employee was the testing coordinator,” school principal Stefanie Phillips tells Teen Vogue. Pinecrest has since developed a new testing security team to review procedures throughout the district’s high schools. But when asked whether ACT has introduced any new protocols, Phillips responds, “ACT has not implemented any unique security measures at Pinecrest [since the incident].”
“I don’t believe there is any amount of apologizing, any documents, or any jobs that could even begin to correct the frustration and stress brought on by this error,” Lindsay says. When applying to colleges in the fall, she plans to use her August score from a different test: the SAT.
“It’s a shame that the students will have to retake a test that they studied so hard for the first time,” says Robyn Weitzel, whose daughter, Stephanie, is a senior at Pinecrest, adding that Stephanie said she does “not want to sit through hours’ worth of an ACT test again.”
Ed Colby, ACT senior director of media and public relations, reiterates for Teen Vogue that the Pinecrest incident was caused by human error, explaining the answer documents “were never sent to ACT.” He claims that situations like these are rare.
“Millions of students take the ACT test every year at the approximately 7,000 ACT test centers located across the country, and virtually all of the thousands of packages containing their answer documents come back to us promptly after every test date,” he says. “Some packages may take longer to arrive, but only rarely does a package go missing.”
In 2018, a package of 220 tests from Lassiter High School in Marietta, Georgia, was lost in the mail. In June 2017, approximately 125 tests went missing after being shipped from University High School in Los Angeles. In late 2016, around 53 exams also went missing from a testing center in Long Island, and 88 answer sheets were never recovered from a September 2015 test in Baltimore. For each case, Colby confirms, the packages “went missing during shipping and, unfortunately, were never found.”
In a statement to Teen Vogue, FedEx spokeswoman Heather Wilson said, “FedEx understands how important these test results are to the students and their families. If these situations occur, we conduct a thorough search for the shipment and work very closely with ACT on the matter.” She did not respond to specific questions about security procedures for ACT tests.
The SAT, another widely used college admission test, has not recently shown a comparable pattern of losing tests. The most recent publicized instance occurred about four years ago, when the tests of 300 students were reportedly lost from a Virginia high school; someone eventually found them in the school’s mailroom. The organization that administers the SAT, the College Board, appears to ship its tests with the United Parcel Service (UPS), instead of FedEx, according to its website. College Board officials have not yet responded to Teen Vogue's requests to clarify which shipping company is the organization's preferred courier.
Colby says ACT is doing what it can to ship tests safely. Among other measures, he says, the organization ensures each package has a FedEx tracking number, provides test coordinators with pre-addressed packages, and alerts FedEx when packages are late. But some students say they want structural change to the way the ACT is administered to prevent these kinds of situations.
“I prefer electronic testing over paper,” Lindsay says. She wants to subtract shipping from the equation altogether. ACT already offers a computerized version of the exam at international test centers and allows states and districts to do so as well if they administer the test on a school day. Computer-based testing is likely to be expanded to the national ACT test dates, Colby says, “but no time frame has yet been established on that.”
Colby does not provide further information about why more progress hasn’t been made toward computer-based testing, but doing so would, as he says, pose “no danger of a package being delayed or damaged.” His logic mirrors the arguments parents and families have used to call for change, rooted in the shortcomings of traditional mail services.
Says Weitzel, the Pinecrest mom, “It’s ridiculous how this can happen in today's world of technology.”
