ACT Test Scores For US Students Drop To a 30-Year Low - Slashdot

Posted by BeauHD

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  Colleges aren't requiring tests any more. Better students have other means to depend on for acceptance. Is it just that the poorer students are the only ones taking the test?
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  • Re:

    Or the higher performing students don't bother preparing as they used to. You can increase you score on these standardized tests significantly by getting a prep book with a few practice tests under timed conditions. There are two things that you need to score highly. (1) Understand the subject matters. (2) Be skilled in taking the test, note this is something separate from the subject matter. But understanding the questions quickly, they follow a template. Having an optimizing strategy, skip questions that

  • Re: Is it just that better students are skipping?

    COVID-19 is a multi-organ disease that affects the brain as well (this has even been shown in MRI and histological studies). Many people suffer from brain fog, concentration difficulties and fatigue for a long period after the infection and there's no guarantee of a full recovery. Even though the brain of young people are more resilient, I'm pretty sure this plays at least some role in the drop of the results.
• In Soviet Russia, achievement tests take you!

  • Re:

    Da tovarisch.

• https://www.ajc.com/education/... [ajc.com]

  On Wednesday, Godwin, the ACT CEO, said rising GPAs are giving students false hope.
  
  “We are also continuing to see a rise in the number of seniors leaving high school without meeting any of the college readiness benchmarks, even as student GPAs continue to rise and students report that they feel prepared to be successful in college,” she said.

  No wonder there's a concerted effort against standardized testing, which could be the last line of defense left against a university who wants to reap tens of thousands in tuition from a student before he realizes he's made a mistake and ended up somewhere he can't succeed. I notice NPR left this quote out.

  • Graph (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Kunedog ( 1033226 ) on Thursday October 12, 2023 @08:49PM (#63921653)

    p.s. The trend is pretty striking when graphed (even without 2023 data):
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    • Re:

      The way I read that graph, scores climbed through the 1990s, were basically flat from about 2000 to 2020, then fell off a cliff.

      What happened? Two possibilities. 1. COVID made everyone stupid. 2. Colleges stopped requiring the ACT, so people stopped doing ACT prep classes that artificially inflated their scores.

      One could also argue that math began trending down as early as 2013, but only barely enough to cancel out the bump caused by allowing calculators in the math section in late 2016, and this might

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• Protip (Score:2, Interesting)

  College is a scam, drop out and learn a trade instead.

  • Re:

    As someone who has taken this path and constantly bitches about not having enough income, no - don't do this unless you're absolutely sure you'll be going into a trade that doesn't have a race to the bottom in wages because everybody and their brother also believed that it was a great way to skip college.

    Lie, cheat, fake it 'till you make it, do whatever it takes to get through college and get a nice well paying job for corporate America.

    • Re:

      Every career is a race to the bottom in terms of wages. If you're not part of the owning class, you're part of the wage slave class. The only difference is that some jobs are intellectually difficult enough and require enough training that it takes the owning class longer to break the backs of the workers.

      If you're lucky enough to take a job in such an industry close enough to the start of the bump, you can save up enough money during the upswing to not care about the negative wage growth during the inevi

      • Re: Protip

        College can be a good deal if you target a professional middle class career field early on and take internships/jobs to network. That coupled with cost saving measures, like in state public universities as opposed to brand name private schools. People run into trouble when they pay out of state tuition at a designer university to study Kinesiology or something with no further plan.

        But college can most definitely be a good deal. For example, who do you think designs airplanes, someone from trade school? Ho

        • Re:

          I don't disagree, but one could cynically argue that when universities are a good deal, they're effectively a trade school by another name. You're learning the things needed for a career in a specific field. Unfortunately, that's kind of the opposite of what a university education traditionally is. In college, you should be broadening your education to make yourself a more well-rounded intellectual, not just doing a deep dive in a particular subject area. That's what a trade school is for.

          Only because t

    • Re:

      At least choose your major carefully;

      "According to the NASW study, the median annual salary for social workers that have earned a graduate degree $48,000."

      "The average salary for an electrician in Washington is around $76,710 per year."

      The amount of rewiring that will be needed to convert to an all-electric infrastructure will keep the electricians busy for a long time.

      • Re:

        Pffft, don't use near worthless degree as benchmark.

        entry level EE in Washington makes $88K a year.

        Get the degree. Do first two years in community college and get last two years in nearby state school where you get resident discount.

        • Re:

          EE = $88k starting, after 4 years of college
          Electrician = $77k, without needing 4 years of college.

          You definitely need to economize your degree to make being an EE worth it in any short period of time.

          Note: I figure that somebody with the ability to get an EE would be a top-percentage electrician.

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          • Re:

            How does an Electrician's pay go up year after year? The long term is important as well, not just starting.

            For an undergrad in Computer Engineering, I got a bit higher than the average starting (for the year), and it's gone up ~14% yearly (compounded) over the past 15 years.

            The college I got my degree from is charges $3200/Semester these days, and my hiring bonus wiped away my $10K student loan.

            The point I want to make is that engineering degrees can be super cheap (as iggymanz said), and can have lon

            • Re:

              Apprentice->Journeyman->Master->Starting their own business.

      • Re:

        And the average graduate degree STEM major is at $125K?

        Don't forget the software that infrastructure will require.:-)

  • Re:

    It's not a scam, it's just not the only path.

  • Re:

    Plenty of opportunities for an adequate ditch digger.

  • Re:

    Computer Science is my trade. I've done self taught and formal degree programs. Learned to program for fun, started school, a couple years in I dropped out for an exceptional job opportunity, went back to school during a "normal" job that followed - employer paid, at another "normal" job I did CS grad school - again employer paid. Note employer support is typically limited to their tax deduction, since I was attending State U I was within the limit. Ivy league would have required a lot of money from my pock

• Even before COVID my child had an A in calculus and the highest grade in his supposedly college-focused charter school. Then they got to college and learned that they actually had not learned calculus and I wound up tutoring them and learned just how much they had not learned. The lack of homework had made me suspicious, but high consistent grades had lulled me into a false sense they were learning something.

  • Re:

    High schools usually teach "pre-calculus", not the same thing

    • Re: Decline of Rigor is a long term trend

      High schools do teach Calculus, but usually only bigger ones since only a handful of students actually take it. Even at a university Calculus can vary. Usually, a standard Calculus class is just the first few parts of Stewart. Some wild Calculus classes are really Real Analysis lite, often based on Spivak.

      Also. Calculus 2 can crush even a moderately well prepared student who had Calculus 1. So it may have not been inadequate Calculus 1, just hardcore Calculus 2.

      • Re: Decline of Rigor is a long term trend

        Also, college math should require at least twice as much time on homework as time spent in class. Really, maybe more like 6-9 hours of homework per week given 3 hours in class.

    • Re:

      Calculus is widely taught in US high schools. The AP exam for Calculus AB (a.k.a. Calc 1) is the 7th most commonly administered AP exam among the 47 AP exams offered, putting it ahead of other, widely taught subjects such as Biology, Physics, Computer Science, Geography, and Economics, among many others.

      https://secure-media.collegebo... [collegeboard.org]

  • Re:

    Out of curiosity, what all did they cover?

    20 years back I was told that I could go straight to Calc 3 when starting my freshman year because of my SAT, AP, transcript, and entrance exam test scores. I loved math, but I decided I could use an easy A, so I opted to take Calc 1. It handed me the first D I had ever received in my life, despite all of the topics being familiar. Calc 2 followed up by handing me my second (and last) D. I fell out of love with math.

    Took Calc 3 during a summer class at a community c

• • Cut administration

    No we should stop throwing good money after bad. Our system is broken, we spend far more per student than other developed nations that do far better educating kids. Too much of the money in the US educational system never makes it to the classroom. Administration and their stupid pet projects skim huge sums of money. We could spend less and get better results if we make sure more money makes it to the classroom. Cut administration staff and their pet projects heavily.

    • Re:

      Agree 100%, but, you also have to remove the incentives for people to obtain teaching credentials with the intention of being promoted to a cushy admin / central office job, or even something low-effort and algorithmic like guidance counselor or librarian. Way too many public school employees are just phoning it in to collect a very lucrative pension.

• Ever lower test scores only demonstrate with hard numbers how racism continues to grow in this country.

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• I couldn't find any breakdown of the average ACT scores by type of school (private, public, homeschool, charter, for-profit, prep, military, etc.), or by type of curriculum (classical, traditional, AP, gifted/talented), nor by size of school system or by spending per student. There are breakdowns by race, sex, and state.

  We're not going to see any positive changes in the scores if we don't even measure the things that might make a difference. Perhaps this information is available and I just couldn't find it.