High school students’ scores on the ACT college admissions test have dropped to their lowest in more than three decades, showing a lack of student preparedness for college-level coursework, according to the nonprofit organization that administers the test.
Scores have been falling for six consecutive years, but the trend accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic. Students in the class of 2023 whose scores were reported Wednesday were in their first year of high school when the virus reached the U.S.
“The hard truth is that we are not doing enough to ensure that graduates are truly ready for postsecondary success in college and career,” said Janet Godwin, chief executive officer for the nonprofit ACT.
The average ACT composite score for U.S. students was 19.5 out of 36. Last year, the average score was 19.8.
That test is useless anyways. I got like a 21 (?) in 2013 … I graduated Magna Cum Laude in 2016 from The University of Akron with BS in Computer Science degree, very very close to Summa Cum Laude.
I’m not going to go as far as to say this is a good thing, but maybe it’s not a bad thing. Standardized testing was the bane of my and my teachers existence growing up, driving an insane amount of regurgitated memorization that … has helped me very little in life. Meanwhile my parents generation was taught things like doing math in their head, math tricks, roman numerals, spelling/grammar rule tricks, and other things I had to learn from them that do come up.
It doesn’t matter what units the ruler is in, how large it is, or even if the marks are uniform. If we’re using the same ruler and the values are getting smaller, we’re regressing in whatever metric that ruler is measuring.
The ACT specifically does not indicate work ethic or grades, but simply a measure of how much in certain subjects you retained. And at a national scale it’s statistical rather than anecdotal. Claiming it’s meaningless is like saying global warming isn’t happening because it was cooler today than in was in 2022 on October 11th.
Standardized testing is nothing but a ruler. Lots of people use rulers incorrectly, but they are still valuable tools. And a year on year decline, presuming their scoring method is statistically uniform (as implied by the article) is significant and concerning.
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My parents are boomers and certainly were not taught to do math in their head. They did it the same way I learned which does not work well for working it out on your head. They are now trying to teach that way with common core math and people are still freaking out about that change.
I have a first grader and the approach to early math seems pretty good. There are equations, but they also use objects to represent numbers in many assignments. Kind of a mix.
I think a lot of people are conditioned to hear “common core math” and interpret that as either “liberals and democrats are destroying our youth and our country” or less commonly “eww something new, it must be bad because past=good.”
The new stuff looks to me like they are teaching a lot of the tricks I picked up on my own to make math easier to do in my head. Mostly finding another number that is much easier to do the math on, like x * 49 is the same as x * 50 - x (which itself is x * 100 / 2 - x). Or sometimes if the actual problem is 296 * 973, seeing that that number will be something close to but less than 300,000 is good enough.
I have kids about that age and despise the new new math. The kindergartner can’t read yet, why are you giving them word problems? I miss the drills.
Word problems for a kindergartener? Yeah that would be annoying.
On my first grader’s homework, I remember seeing one proper word problem and it was a “challenge yourself further” type section at the end of the worksheet.