How long does it take to get our results? ACAT score reports are prepared within 7-10 business days after PACAT receives answer sheets or notification to close an online cohort. Special scoring which does not conform to this schedule may be available upon request for an additional fee. Automatically generated preliminary ACAT scores can be sent to a departmental representative by e-mail 15 - 20 minutes after the completion of an online session. Departments can have score reports sent by US Postal Service or email.
Who will the reports be sent to? PACAT provides two copies of the score report for each administration and for the final end-of-year cumulative report. The contents can be the same or designed to meet the needs of two different individuals. A Score Report Profile is provided with each order of print tests or on request. The profile will show the addresses of the individual(s) to receive the two report copies. If the information is incorrect, it can be updated and returned to PACAT by mail, fax, or e-mail as a scanned attachment. Contact us if you need to change the individual(s) designated to receive your reports and we'll send you a Score Report Profile to update and return. We are unable to send score reports to an individual not specified on the Score Report Profile
What information will be in my score report? agriculture, art, biology, business, communication, criminal justice, geology, history, literature in English, political science, psychology, social work). Each report can contain the following components. Selection is made using the Score Report Profile.Group Raw Scores: These are percent correct scores. Standard scores for ACAT include a compensation for item difficulty and penalties for incorrect responses. These adjustments are not included in the raw scores. The raw scores should not be considered as equivalent to scores on an in-class test. Group Demographics: Your students voluntarily report their gender, whether or not they transferred to your institution, their graduate school plans, and their overall and major grade point averages. These are presented as aggregate data in tabular format. Courses Taken: Students voluntarily report the content areas included in courses they have taken at your institution. The correlations between taking courses and scores in the corresponding content areas are presented. Self-reported GPA: Students voluntarily report their GPAs in the major and overall in half point increments. The correlations between GPA and scores in the content areas and overall are presented. Annual Departmental Gains: The change indicators compare the students in your current group to a cumulative group consisting of the students you have tested since beginning use of ACAT. The indicators are similar to what would be the case if ACAT was a locally developed test used only at your institution and interpreted by comparison to the performance of your previous graduates. This information is provided in end-of-year reports only. Standard Scores by Name: This is a table of student standard scores in each content area and overall with a percentile for overall performance. The table includes names and ID numbers, sorted by name. Standard Scores by ID: The table includes student ID numbers and scores without names. Stanine Scores by Name: Stanines are general indicators of performance when placing individual performance within percentile bands is preferred to using specific standard scores and percentiles. Stanines divide the distribution of scores into 9 percentile ranges. The table includes names and ID numbers, sorted by name. Stanine Scores by ID: The table includes ID numbers and scores without names. Pre-post Gain Scores and Percentiles: The table lists the pretest and senior exit scores for each student taking both and the gain scores compared to a multi-year pre-post reference group. Available to programs conducting ACAT pre-post testing only. Pretest and senior exit tests must be given a minimum of 12 months apart to participate. Pre-post gain scores are only available at this time for biology, criminal justice, psychology, and social work. These scores are provided in the June final report only.
Do we get individual student scores on pretests? Only group data are routinely reported for pretests. We do not routinely include individual student pretest scores in our reports. ACAT used as a pretest is designed to assess only an overall cohort. If individual scores are made available, there is a possibility of introducing an inadvertent bias towards students who perform poorly.
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