ASU to revise how it scores for admission

Two or more tries’ best results on exams will be combined

Arkansas State University has tweaked its rules for admissions and institutional scholarships, ensuring students greater access to the institution and aligning with other Arkansas schools, its chancellor said.

With the changes, the state’s second-largest public campus, with more than 14,000 students, will take the best scores of each subgroup — English, reading, math and science — of each student’s attempts at the ACT college entrance exam. The practice is known as “superscoring” and will be used for admissions for the fall 2018 school year. Previously, ASU used the composite score of one ACT exam.

“We had been denying access to students based on a strict interpretation of ACT scores that our peers have not been using,” ASU Chancellor Kelly Damphousse said in a prepared statement. “We believe this will create greater access to our university.”

The method will be applied to admissions as well as institutional scholarships. Otherwise, the university’s admissions standards will remain the same: at least a 21 ACT and a 2.75 high school grade-point average for unconditional admission and a minimum 19 ACT and 2.3 high school GPA for conditional admission. Admission into the university’s Honor College will not change.

The Princeton Review, which surveyed schools and verified admissions policies on institutions’ websites, said more than half of all “selective” colleges and universities are using the superscoring method, said James Murphy, its director of national outreach. Selective institutions are those that only accept roughly two-thirds or fewer of the students who apply, he said, and the numbers of those institutions are going up.