PLAN ACT's College Readiness Test for Sophomores
The PLAN test (as described by the ACT Corporation) helps 10th graders build a solid foundation for future academic and career success and provides information needed to address school districts' high-priority issues. It is a comprehensive guidance resource that helps students measure their current academic development, explore career/training options, and make plans for the remaining years of high school and post-graduation years. The PLAN test can help all students—those who are college-bound as well as those who are likely to enter the workforce directly after high school.
As a "pre-ACT" test, PLAN is a powerful predictor of success on the ACT. At the same time, Bayard Public Schools recognizes the importance of PLAN testing for all students, as it focuses attention on both career preparation and improving academic achievement.
The test is comparable to the ACT test and involves the following:
ENGLISH TEST ---This test measures your understanding of standard written English with regard to punctuation, grammar and usage, and sentence structure (Usage/Mechanics)—as well as your understanding of the appropriate use of strategy, organization, and style in writing (Rhetorical Skills). Rather than emphasizing memorization of rules of grammar, the test stresses the analysis of the kinds of prose that students read and write in most high school and college programs. The test consists of four prose passages, each accompanied by a number of multiple-choice questions.
MATHEMATICS TEST ---This test measures your achievement in solving practical quantitative problems. The skills learned in many first- and second-year high school courses (pre-algebra, first-year algebra, and plane geometry) are tested, but most of the questions (including those in geometry) emphasize content presented before the second year of high school. The test focuses on your ability to reason quantitatively rather than on memorized formulas or involved computations. All the questions are multiple choices. Use of calculators is permitted on the Mathematics Test.
READING TEST ---This test measures your reading comprehension by focusing on skills you use in studying written materials from a range of subject areas. These skills include referring to details in the passage, drawing conclusions, and making comparisons and generalizations. Knowledge of information outside the passages, vocabulary taken out of context, and rules of formal logic are not tested. The test consists of three prose passages typical of those encountered in high school courses: one passage in the social sciences, one in the humanities, and one in prose fiction. Each passage is followed by several multiple-choice questions.
SCIENCE TEST--- This test measures your scientific reasoning skills, based on material that is typically covered in first- and second-year high school general science courses, including topics in biology, chemistry, physics, geology, astronomy, and meteorology. The test presents five sets of scientific information: two in the data representation format (graphs, tables, and other schematic forms), two in the research summaries format (descriptions of several related experiments), and one in the conflicting viewpoints format (two or more hypotheses that are inconsistent with one another). The multiple-choice questions that follow each set require you to understand the information provided, to examine critically the relationships between the information and the hypotheses developed, and to generalize from the information in order to draw conclusions or make predictions. The use of calculators is not permitted.
Information from the ACT Corporation.
For further information contact:
Tammy Tillman
Bayard Public Schools
726 4th Avenue
Bayard, Nebraska 69334
Phone: 308-586-1700
Fax: 308-586-1638
E-mail: ttillman@panesu.org