North Carolina is poised to make sweeping changes in the way it evaluates students and high schools by requiring students to take the ACT, a national college entrance exam.

Under the plan that the State Board of Education has been refining for months, most 11th-graders will be required to take the exam. Students will also take pre-tests leading to the ACT in eighth grade and 10th grade. The state would pay students' registration fees.

The board has two reasons for wanting to require the national tests. First, ACT scores will be used as a factor in determining how well schools are educating students.

Second, schools will be able to identify students who do poorly on the exam - an indication that they're not ready for college work. Those students will be encouraged to attend an academic "boot camp" in the summer after their junior year. The summer schoolwork would be tailored toward getting those students ready to take the ACT Compass, a test that some community colleges use to place students in appropriate courses.

The testing changes reflect a state and national emphasis on making high school graduates ready for college and careers.

The testing plan would also mark a change for college-bound high school students. The ACT is a little-used exam in North Carolina. Most students in the state take the SAT college entrance exam. If the board approves the new testing program, about 80,000 high school juniors - about 86percent - would take the ACT, at a cost of about $3million.

Preliminary estimates put the cost for requiring the eighth-grade test at $713,000 a year and at $850,000 for mandating the 10th-grade test.

Why the ACT?

The state chose the ACT rather than the SAT because the ACT measures what students have learned in their courses, board Chairman Bill Harrison said. ACT scores also predict students' grades in first-year college courses, he said.

"We think it makes perfect sense to use a test that colleges use and that the testing company has determined" is a predictor of college success, he said. As a selling point, state officials emphasize that when applying to college, students can use a test that the state pays for.

The state would continue its practice of paying for students who take the preliminary SAT, and would exempt 10th-graders who do well on the SAT or ACT from taking the ACT the next year with their classmates. The state would not pay for 10th-graders who take a college entrance exam.

North Carolina would join a handful of states that require high school students to take college entrance exams. Looking at the experiences of other states, some experts warn that there are downsides to using a college entrance exam to assess high school students.

"The ACT and SAT exams are not generally used to diagnose problems," said Cheryl Blanco, vice president for special projects at the Southern Regional Education Board. "They're used for admission purposes and to find out whether (students) can do college work."

Course grades are better predictors of college success, Blanco said, which is why some colleges have de-emphasized standardized admissions exams or decided not to require them.

David Rutkowski, a senior research assistant at the Center for Evaluation and Education Policy at Indiana University, said test preparation courses improve scores, which may hurt students who don't take test prep.

If states are going to give admissions tests to all students, the concerns about test-prep advantages should be addressed, he said.

End-of-course exams would still be part of the testing array for high school students. Those test results would count as 25percent of the final course grade, and results would continue to be used to evaluate high schools. End-of-grade tests in math, language arts and science would continue for students in third through eighth grades, though the board is moving toward not having poor performance be a factor in whether students are promoted.

Why more tests?

Adding more tests raises questions for parents, who are curious about the costs and benefits of increasing the testing load.

"That's adding an awful lot of tests," said Andrea Scheviak of Raleigh, who has two children at Leesville Road High School. Her eldest child, a senior, took the SATs, as do most college-bound North Carolina students. She suggested students should be able to choose which tests they take.

The state board intends to vote on the plan next month and will discuss when to implement the changes.