The North Carolina legislature recently passed a bill requiring all high-school juniors to take the ACT. That seems pretty meddlesome, but looks much worse in light of a recent NBER paper finding the the ACT isn’t particularly good at predicting college success. Only two of its four tests were found to be effective predictors. Former congressman Bob Barr discusses this matter on his Atlanta Journal-Constitution blog here.

I suppose the SAT people will lobby for their test and the Fair Test crowd will lobby to ban all tests. This is another reason why government shouldn’t intervene in education.