SALT LAKE CITY — Utah lawmakers will take a close look at doing away with the SAGE test for high school students and replacing it with the ACT, a popular assessment used in college admissions.

Utah's year-end standardized testing system has faced controversy since its introduction in 2014, with the number of students opting out steadily increasing.

On Tuesday, the Utah State Board of Education recommended that legislators switch high school freshmen and sophomores to the ACT Aspire test, a sort of pre-ACT that assesses students in English, math, reading, science and writing.

The State School Board also recommended that legislators abandon the SAGE test for high school juniors and instead direct them to use the traditional ACT exam as the year-end assessment, as some districts already do.

"Our hypothesis is that given the name recognition with ACT, that hopefully would solve the issues we're seeing with opt-out," said Rich Nye, the state school board's deputy superintendent of student achievement.

Lawmakers on the Education Interim Committee voted to open a bill file to begin drafting legislation on the topic.

"The Aspire and the ACT mean something to students," Sen. Howard Stephenson, R-Draper, said. "It means something to them personally. So when they take that test, they're going to be invested in it."

Feedback from educators and administrators was "mixed," Nye said.

Logan Toone, director of assessment at Davis School District, said in an email that he was "torn" about the idea.

"Parents, students and teachers have grown accustomed to having data that identifies how well they did at the end of a course," Toone said. "The ACT won’t give that info."

"It will identify students who are college-ready in math, English, reading and science, but it won’t inform the chemistry teacher, the secondary Math III teacher, or the English 10 teacher about how well the students did on the specific standards for their course like the SAGE does," Toone said.

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Kimberly Bird, assistant to the superintendent of Alpine School District, said she believes administrators in the district would support a switch to the ACT Aspire test for 9th- and 10th-graders. Juniors in Alpine School District have been taking the traditional ACT as their year-end test for three years, she said.

"It wouldn't be anything really new to us," Bird said.

Administrators in Canyons School District haven't discussed the idea of switching to the ACT Aspire test, said spokesman Jeff Haney, but he said the district will begin using the ACT to assess high school juniors instead of SAGE next year.

"We think that there could be an uptick in demonstrated competency because students have an incentive to do well on the ACT," Haney said. "Right now there's really no incentive for the students to perform well on SAGE."

But others, like Murray School District Superintendent Steven Hirase, expressed disappointment about abandoning SAGE.

"It's a better assessment and reflects what students are doing in their classrooms better than the ACT does," Hirase said.

But with schools banned from incentivizing SAGE or incorporating SAGE results into student grades, students are not taking the test seriously, rendering the results unreliable, Hirase said — nor does there seem to be much parent support for bringing those incentives back.

"Unfortunately, I think that ship has sailed," he said.

Angie Stallings, deputy superintendent of policy and communication at the State School Board, warned lawmakers it would be hard to pull off the changes by the 2017-18 school year.

The school grading system — in which schools are given A, B, C, D or F grades — is based on SAGE scores, meaning that it will also have to be overhauled.

The State School Board suggests basing 60 percent of the school grades on a mixture of performance and improvement on the ACT Aspire and ACT tests. The rest of the score would be made up of other factors like dropout recovery, absenteeism, high school graduation rates and grades in advanced courses.

Rep. Carol Spackman Moss, D-Holladay, raised the idea of getting rid of school grades entirely.

"Is it helping education?" she asked. "That's the bottom line. Is it improving educational outcomes for the kids? If it's just a complicated measure for these fine folks there that have to deal with it, why do we persist in doing it?"

But committee co-chairman Rep. Brad Last, R-Hurricane, expressed frustration that legislators "don't get it just right, so the next conversation is just throw it out."

"We're operating in a political environment, and were it not so, I'm not sure we'd be having the problems with the SAGE test that we're having," Last said.

"The school grading does have value,” he added. “But it's only as good as the formula we create.”

Administering ACT Aspire to 9th- and 10th-graders will cost $2.6 million per year, according to State School Board vice chairman Davis Thomas. He noted that most of those costs will be offset by savings from dropping SAGE for high schoolers. Email: dchen@deseretnews.com Twitter: DaphneChen_

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