Because advising and course placement decisions are among the most influential factors affecting student retention, advisors at your school should have the best information available.
ACT resources can help each advisor do this important job better.
- Obtaining academic and background data about advisees
- Placing students in courses that match their interests and abilities
- Helping students explore their educational and career options
- Improving the quality of academic advising
Obtaining academic and background data about advisees
To deliver quality academic advising, you need timely and accurate information. Assessment tools from ACT give advisors the right data to start conversations and build relationships with their student advisees.
Using the comprehensive information these assessments provide, advisors can match student abilities, needs, and interests with institutional resources.
When walk-in entry-level assessment is required (as, for instance, at many two-year colleges and career schools), ASSET®, COMPASS™, and CPAt offer rich resources in both cognitive and noncognitive areas.
Placing students in courses that match their interests and abilities
Appropriate course placement is vital to student success, persistence, and satisfaction. Incorrect placement can have adverse long-term effects on these important outcomes.
Assessment tools from ACT offer a highly accurate and cost-effective basis for course placement. By combining students' test scores with information about their high school coursework and their needs, interests, and goals, advisors and faculty members can make placement recommendations with a high degree of validity.
Your institution benefits from reduced test development costs, compared to the use of local or commercially available tests.
The Course Placement Service uses advanced statistical techniques to assess each student's probability of success, allowing institutions to make the best placement decisions possible. Using this service, institutions can study the accuracy of their course placement procedures and select optimum cutoff scores.
Helping students explore their educational and career options
By enabling and encouraging students to make informed educational and vocational decisions, you improve student motivation and retention.
Assessment tools from ACT give your students the information they need to make informed choices about their future.
The ACT Assessment® Program delivers comprehensive career development resources, including information about:
- High school courses and grades
- Educational and vocational plans and degree of certainty
- Extracurricular activities
- ACT Interest Inventory
- World-of-Work Map
The World-of-Work Map and Interest Inventory, in particular, are a uniquely productive career planning combination, unavailable in any other single assessment resource.
The WorkKeys® system helps students understand the levels of performance employers expect and motivates students to prepare for the jobs they want.
ACT also offers support for institutionwide initiatives in:
Improving the quality of academic advising
To help evaluate your current advising program, the Survey of Academic Advising and the Student Opinion Survey facilitate student feedback about advising strengths and weaknesses. These two surveys are part of ACT's Evaluation/Survey Services.
Aggregate reports available through the ACT Assessment give you access to valuable group data on entering students that you can use for advisor training and in-service workshops with faculty and professional staff.