Committee hears bill to let new NDA+ test and military courses qualify students for North Dakota scholarship

House Bill 1404 would add options for students to qualify for the North Dakota Scholarship, including using a scale score on the new NDA+ summative assessment equivalent to an ACT score of 24 and allowing completion of two credits of specified military coursework as an additional indicator in the military-ready pathway.

Representative Cynthia Schreiberbeck, District 25, introduced the bill and asked the committee for favorable consideration.

Jim Uppgren, Department of Public Instruction (DPI), provided detailed testimony. “The North Dakota Scholarship is a $6,000 college scholarship awarded to students based on requirements met while they were in high school,” Uppgren told the committee. He said the scholarship is aligned with the state’s Choice Ready high school accountability metrics but is written with “rigorous expectations above and beyond what’s required for the basic Choice Ready baseline graduation requirements.”

Uppgren explained the bill’s two main changes: permitting the NDA+ summative assessment to substitute for the ACT or SAT test score requirement if the NDA+ scale score is shown to be equivalent in rigor to an ACT 24, and creating a discrete military coursework pathway that would let students meet the military-ready pathway’s additional-indicator requirement by earning two credits from a specified sequence of military courses. He listed the proposed military courses: Introduction to Military Careers, ASVAB Essential Skills for Military Success, Military Health and Fitness, Career Foundations of Military Leadership, and Military Leadership Capstone.

DPI officials said the state’s new NDA+ assessment is being administered to tenth graders this school year; the process to link an NDA+ scale score to an ACT 24 will require psychometric work and a short review period. Dan Shower, assessment director for DPI, described the standard-setting and linking process and said the department expects to run a primary linkage analysis and then re-check the result the following year before recommending a numeric NDA+ cutoff. “Once we get that study done . . . we’ll post the study publicly on our website,” Shower said.

Uppgren and DPI staff also noted the bill removes obsolete language that referenced use of the ACT for accountability because the state is moving tenth graders to the NDA+ for annual accountability and is no longer paying for the ACT as a statewide accountability instrument.

Rebecca Pollard, director of strategic operations for the North Dakota Center for Distance Education (NDCDE), and Caitlin Allen, NDCDE director of curriculum (testifying virtually), described the military coursework program NDCDE is building. Allen said the military-prep sequence was developed in collaboration with the North Dakota National Guard and modeled in part on other states’ programs. She said the first course, Introduction to Military Careers, launched with 36 students enrolled and that NDCDE has requested funding to waive program costs for up to 100 students.

No formal committee vote on House Bill 1404 was recorded during this hearing; proponents requested the committee give the bill a favorable recommendation.

The bill drew technical questions from committee members about how the NDA+ linking would be done, how often the equivalent scale score would be reviewed, whether military courses would be available only through the Center for Distance Education or also through local schools, and how GPA is calculated for eligibility. DPI officials said the GPA requirement for the scholarship is an actual (non‑weighted) 3.0 on a 4.0 scale and that course approvals and course codes can be picked up by any school that chooses to offer them once the courses are approved.