ACT Scores Show Most Students Aren’t Ready for College (page 2)

Troubling Signs

But ACT officials saw troubling signs in the data as well. Jon L. Erickson, the organization’s vice president for educational services, said that while it is welcome news that more students, especially those in traditionally underserved populations, are taking the college-entrance and -placement test, their performance on the college-readiness benchmarks illustrates the need for better preparation, especially in mathematics and science.

While 67 percent of the test-takers in the class of 2009 met college-ready benchmarks in English and 53 percent did so in reading, only 42 percent did so in math and 28 percent did so in science, according to the test results.

“With all the focus now on STEM, it’s a concern that we see far fewer students meeting those benchmarks in science and math,” he said of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

ACT, which is a key partner in a national, multi-organization effort to design common academic standards, determines colleage readiness by surveying thousands of high school and college instructors every few years to glean the knowledge and skills students need to pass entry-level, credit-bearing courses in college. Its research has pinpointed test-score cutoffs, or benchmarks, that predict a 75 percent chance of earning a C or better in such courses.

Mr. Erickson said a number of factors contribute to students’ falling short of college-readiness benchmarks. Too many high schools lack a focus on college-readiness skills, he said, and don’t “zero in” on key standards that need to be mastered. In some cases, high school students are not taking the right courses, and in others, the courses themselves are not sufficiently rigorous to impart college-level skill and knowledge, he said.

ACT data showed that students who took what the organization defines as a “core curriculum”—four years of English and at least three years each of rigorous natural science, social science, and mathematics—scored better on the test than those who did not. Seventy percent of the test-takers said they had taken a core curriculum.

Robert Schaeffer, the public education director of the National Center for Fair & Open Testing, a Cambridge, Mass.-based testing watchdog group known as FairTest, said the “stagnant” ACT scores reflect a failure of the promise of the federal No Child Left Behind Act to boost achievement and improve college readiness.

“Politicians can make all the claims they want that it is raising achievement, but even when there are improvements in state test scores, they don’t show up in college-admissions test data, or on [the National Assessment of Educational Progress],” he said. “So where is the beef?”

Mr. Schaeffer also noted that a FairTest analysis of ACT score changes between 2008 and 2009 shows little narrowing in the gaps between racial and ethnic minority students and their white peers. The ACT scores show only 4 percent of black students and 10 percent of Hispanic students meeting college-readiness benchmarks in all four subject areas in 2009, compared with 28 percent of white students and 36 percent of Asian students.

The College Board was scheduled to release its national SAT scores on Aug. 25.

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