Overview

The College Board and ACT have recently released concordance tables to facilitate comparisons between ACT and SAT scores. These concordance tables should be used when comparing ACT and SAT scores for students applying for terms after fall 2018. For information on how the concordance tables were developed and other information from the testing agencies, review the Guide to the 2018 ACT/SAT Concordance.   

In Slate, these concordance tables are managed via translation codes. In an effort to make the transition to the new concordance tables as seamless as possible, we will be making updates to all production databases that have added ACT/SAT translation codes from the Slate Template Library. While we will be preserving the existing translation codes, their keys will be updated so that existing resources (forms, queries, rules, etc.) referencing the old translation codes will no longer use those values. At the exact same moment, we will add the new translation codes using the original keys. As a result, all resources that have been configured to use the current concordance tables will immediately begin using the new concordance tables without any manual intervention necessary. 

Your institution will only need to take action under the following circumstances:

• Your institution wishes to preserve high score calculations from previous years.

• Your institution has custom export values associated with your existing concordance translation tables.

If neither of these situations apply to you, then you do not need to take any action. The new concordance tables will be added with the same keys as the previous tables; this will ensure that existing rules, forms, queries, etc. will immediately begin using the new concordance tables. 

Preserving High Score Calculations

To prevent records with previous entry terms from being updated moving forward, simply build a "No Action" rule in the same exclusivity group as your existing high score calculation rules. This "No Action" rule should have a higher priority than any calculation rules (e.g., priority 0 or 1), and the filter should be configured to find the records that should not be updated.  When a record meets the filter criteria for a rule in an exclusivity group, subsequent rules in that group stop being evaluated, so using a "No Action" rule as the first rule that runs will effectively remove the population of records that should not be updated. More information about exclusivity groups can be found in this Rules Editor documentation.

Using the filter "Field Prompt Exists" with the selected operands "Entry Term IN Inactive" would match all records with an entry term prompt value that is inactive. As previous term prompts are inactivated as part of cycle prep each year, a rule of this nature would not need to be updated, as it is always filtering for records with inactive term prompts. 

This rule is displayed below: 

Alternatively, if your Fall 2018 entry term prompt is not yet inactive, and you are not yet ready to make the prompt inactive, you can use the "Entry Term" (or similar) filter to identify those active terms to take no action on with this rule:

Adding Custom Export Values to the New Concordance Tables

If you added any custom export values to your existing concordance tables, those will not exist in the newly inserted concordance tables. Because the score ranges are different between the old and the new concordance tables, it's not possible for us to automatically transfer over any custom export values. After the updates are made in late August, you should access your translation codes and update the concordance tables with any custom export values as desired. Translation codes can be updated in batch using Upload Dataset.