The ACT results are likely to be higher than the performance of the average American high school senior. That’s because most students who voluntarily take the test aspire to attend college. Fifty-seven percent of America’s graduating class of 2014 took the test, an 18 percent increase since 2010.
The ACT defines college readiness benchmarks as the minimum score a student must achieve on the test in order to have a 75 percent chance of earning a C or higher in a first-year college course. Twenty-six percent of all tested students met the benchmark in all four subjects in 2014, compared with 24 percent in 2010. But 31 percent of students hit none of the benchmarks.
“Nothing changes, but if you test over a million students a year, you don’t expect much to change,” said Mark Schneider, a vice president of the research nonprofit American Institutes for Research, who previously oversaw the federal government’s education research.
Some contend ACT’s bar for college readiness is too high. “What is often forgotten is that the ACT and the SAT are probability statements,” said Anthony Carnevale a Georgetown University professor who researches workforce skills and headed a testing company for several years. “We know that anybody who scores in the upper half in the distribution in the ACT or the SAT has a very high chance of graduating from college. This is not so much about readiness, it’s about graduating. To say that only 20 percent are ready when 50 percent have a chance to graduate is a little stiff to me.”