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.
Yes, the combination of continued gutting of the public school system followed by a pandemic will do that. 
A lot of my daughter’s classmates feel high school is pointless because the oncoming climate apocalypse will make most of it irrelevant.
And this is a blood-red rural Florida county, I imagine it’s even more prevalent elsewhere.
Fellow Floridian here. I appreciate what I’ve learned in school, but it feels like they were preparing us for an ideal world that never existed. Things are especially bleak here in Florida with the affordability crisis, the environmental crisis, and the political crisis.
I’m guessing it’s a combination of:
- Pandemic;
- An increase in bullying and violence, along with deteriorating mental health;
- The internet slowly destroying our attention spans;
- Republican attacks on education and the resulting teacher exodus, along with increasing teacher burnout because of these factors.
- Expanding wealth inequality and lack of social services.
- Questioning if there’s even a point to any of it if humanity is doomed within their lifetime.
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K-12 knowledge is easier than ever to learn or reference yourself thanks to the internet and AI.
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College isn’t for most people, regardless of what we’ve been told to get us to spend egregious amounts of money on it.
I think traditional schooling will become less and less relevant as technology improves and disciplines become more specialized. Fewer people will be able to stick with academia long enough to reach that specialization, and more people will be able to supplement academia with technology.
Survivor bias usually comes out in full force though when anyone mentions how academia is overrated.
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Closing schools for extensive periods of time will do that. We have an entire generation of stunted students.
Socially stunted too.
I do a lot of workforce analytics and am seeing a big uptick in the COVID cohort job bouncing very fast in a matter of months.
There’s some kids out there that lost some years figuring themselves out and therefore figuring out what they want to do after school.
The best way I can dumb it down is imagine being 15, then blackout, then the cliche, “Welcome to the real world.”. Most of us didn’t know what we wanted to be doing or felt underprepared on HS graduation, these kids copped that incredibly hard.
I’m adjusting our model so that they get a chance instead of some older generation shredding them for being unprepared. It’s brutal and they need a hand adapting to how cunty society be.
And society be cunty af
The numbers were trending down prior to 2020 according to the article
But we may have saved grandma I guess. It’s not like theirs a limited amount of years where learning is most effective.
I agree. How many years was it closed for you during elementary school grammar lessons?
Fuuuck.
Don’t ask them to do math too! Don’t you know they missed a ton of school?
I think the point they were trying to make was that the lockdowns were excessive and did more harm than good. Yes, old people and those with pre-existing conditions got to live a bit longer. This was at the cost of fucking up an entire generation of kids. We’re only just starting to see the repercussions of this.
I’m not taking a side, just clarifying what I believe they were trying to put into words.
Yo, why do you hate Grandma? What did she ever do to you?
You know what? Screw this attitude. Those years were insanely hard for me. I worked remotely while helping my kids while my wife worked as a nurse in the hardest hit area of the US. They opened the bars in my area before they opened the schools and that still pisses me off.
And despite that hell I would do it again.
No way, in the country that made Betsy Devos in charge of education? In a country that lets public schools teach creationism as an equal theory to evolution? In a country where a racist far right extremist governor can cherrypick what students are and aren’t allowed to read and learn? In a country where profit is the motive behind every action? In the same country where you have to be rich or go into debt to go to college but get harassed every day in high school by military recruiters on campus?
Seems kind of farfetched.
Holy shit that’s terrible. This isn’t a flex it’s just to show how awful this is. I got a 26 overall which was fine. I fucking bombed the math portion with an 18 thanks to undiagnosed ADHD and Dyscalculia.
I struggled to get into colleges that could actually help me find a career after school with a 26, in fact I never did make it. I went to a small local school. I’m not a crazy smart person I’d consider myself very average. I paid enough attention in school to not have to crack a book at home, I did my homework in class or study hall, I crashed for the finals, and then I got out of there as soon as possible. I still got 7 points higher without ever cracking an ACT prep book or even studying. How… HOW has it come to this? How is it this fucking low? It’s not even enough to get into most colleges is it?
I’m interested to know if the number of students taking the test has remained the same. If that number is dropping, it may skew the scores and tell a different tale.
I would expect it to be higher if that’s the case. The ones that wouldn’t take it would probably be the ones not planning on going to college.
Could also be changes in what colleges are looking for. None of the colleges around me used ACT scores when I graduated, I only took the SAT.
Most colleges took both when I graduated, although they seem to prefer the SAT, which was the more popular of the two. I took both and found the ACT to be the easier of the two.
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.
Idk about elsewhere but here most the students taking the ACT here are for graduation requirements because we can give it weekly until they finally get a score deemed high enough to cover a requirement they’re missing.
Meanwhile SAT is on very specific dates, and is what people take to try and get scholarships/into good colleges.
So I mean… yeah… we’re repeatedly giving it to kids who can’t pass Algebra I or English 2, of course that’s skewing the numbers.
I got a 26 while infecting the entire room with the flu, because the ACT is also the Prairie state achievement exam required for graduation in Illinois and there are no make ups.
Every time I got to the math parts, I just filled in the bubbles at random and still somehow got labeled as “above average” in math when I can’t even divide or multiply very well.
Same. I’ve been struggling with math ever since elementary school. I’ve flunked algebra in middle school and high school. Geometry was even worse for me.
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By how many different metrics is the u.s. in decline now?
Yes.
I don’t know if there is any hope of avoiding the whole fascism thing on our way to collapse but I sure hope so. Ugh this country is so fucked up.
China’s demographic situation is horrid, Russia’s demographic situation is horrid, Germany’s demographic and industrial situation is horrid. Being one of the major countries that doesn’t have such fundamental problems almost guarantees future success for the US.
almost guarantees future success for the US.
Or maybe you’re not recognizing how we are evolving as a species. Traditional schooling is becoming less relevant as technology improves and disciplines become more specialized. Only the most dedicated students will be able to reach that specialization, and everyone else can supplement general academic knowledge with technology.
It’ll be an interesting few decades ahead. I’m saying things nobody really wants to admit, but a lot of people feel are true. They just need it to be articulated.
The ones who will stop progress here are those with survivor bias and those profiting off of the current system.
Is this like the SAT?
It’s the same group but the ACT is IIRC more of a general skills test than the basic math reading and writing the SAT throws at you.
When I took it I know it had a section on the scientific method and I think it had a basic history section too.
Ah okay, I took the sat back in 98. Never had heard of act. Than you for filling me in.
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No, it’s this goddamn electricity, wearing us down, wearing down our faculties!
UH OH, fifteen minutes to Judge Wapner.
I’d wager a lot of students just don’t care because they really shouldn’t.
Thanks to the internet, and now AI, pretty much all the information they’ll ever need is right at their fingertips.
Why would they focus on academia which teaches them to make things harder on themselves so it’s easier on teachers?
Also, modern schools are just propaganda mills these days anyways. Their goals are to get students to conform and waste money at college.
I’m a firm believer that academia is not for everyone, and we shouldn’t be forcing it to be. It should be there for those who want it, and nothing is wrong with those who don’t.
When I say Gen Z and newer are fucking stupid, I mean it. Many have very low media literacy, don’t understand how to use a desktop computer and are wholly absorbed with social media.
It isn’t really their fault though. Education salaries have dried up in the public sector over the last 20 years. I had typing classes, various computer literacy classes and higher maths available to me prior to high school. Somehow these programs have changed or evaporated while band and sports programs continue to swell.
And yet the dumbest shit I hear on a consistent basis comes from boomers. Maybe you’re just surrounded by dumb kids? Maybe you’re just too dumb to get what they’re into and talking about? Kids these days are insanely smart, but not skilled. Maybe that’s what you were trying to express? Most of the kids I know are really intelligent and advanced for their age, and definitely so for the same comparable ages when I was a kid.
I’d argue that anyone who was happy to make education worse for future generations was “fucking stupid”. They cut their nose off to spite their face, so to speak.
Why would someone want doctors, surgeons, scientists, and everyone in every other skilled profession to have less of an education? What part of that isn’t “fucking stupid”? Too many people don’t think about the long term consequences. What’s going to happen when the older generations retire?
I hope that you’re trying to stop education cuts, otherwise you’re a part of the problem that you’re talking about.
Many have very low media literacy, don’t understand how to use a desktop computer and are wholly absorbed with social media.
“Many don’t know how to use an abacus and are wholly absorbed by television!”
Yea, it’s the same old complaint as every generation. Not like there’s evidence of actual mental decline like… oh wait…
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.
