Posted on 08/18/2010 5:42:19 AM PDT by reaganaut1
Average scores on the ACT college entrance exam inched downward this year, yet slightly more students who took the test proved to be prepared for college, according to a report released Wednesday.
The findings sound contradictory. But the exam's authors point to a growing and more diverse group of test-takers — many are likely scoring lower overall, but more are also meeting benchmarks used to measure college readiness.
Last spring's high-school seniors averaged a composite score of 21.0 on the test's scale of 1 to 36, down slightly from 21.1 last year and the lowest score of the last five years.
At the same time, 24 percent of ACT-tested students met or surpassed all four of the test's benchmarks measuring their preparedness for college English, reading, math and science. That is up from 23 percent last year and 21 percent in 2006.
Although that still shows three in four test-takers will likely need remedial help in at least one subject to succeed in college, ACT officials are encouraged to see improvement as ever-larger numbers of students take the exam.
"It's slow progress," said Cynthia Schmeiser, president and chief operating officer of ACT's education division. "We are headed in the right direction."
Schmeiser highlighted slight gains in math and science readiness, traditional weak spots for U.S. students. The number of students prepared for college-level biology, for example, has risen from 21 percent to 24 percent in five years.
On the not-so-encouraging front, ACT-takers prepared for college English have dropped from 69 percent to 66 percent in that span. Still, English remains a strong suit for ACT test-takers compared to other subjects.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Only 24% passed. This story is a real spin.
Personally, we need to thank the highly overpaid union teachers for showing what obvious failures you are.
Loudly.
Our public school system is really doing a great job providing our colleges and universities with such a plethora of underperformers to fill their remedial English and Math classrooms.
Mrs. Prince of Space
I hope it’s getting better. I remember students in the 90s who had to take MATH 100, which while I was helping out a student I noticed was basically junior-high math. They were teaching these guys the number line, positive and negative numbers! I’m sorry, but if you still have to be taught that, you are NOT ready for college.
Yeah, because parents dont have any responsibility for their kids' education. It is all the teacher's fault that kids are little spoiled a-holes these days and 70% of parents never bother to even meet their kid's teachers. There are a hell of a lot more good conservative teachers out there than you think, who can't raise the kid for the parents.
Way to lower the bar. Again.
IOW, affirmative action applied to the test arena. "Contradictory" means "We're going to find them qualified, objective test scores be damned,"
There are bad teachers for sure.
A student in a public High School in 1960 received an education and graduated with more knowledge and ability to reason than you get from a graduate of a 4 year college program today ,, you can blame the parents all you want but it’s undeniable that no matter how ambitious the kid the quality of a high school education has plummeted. Even the kids in the “advanced” classes are no better than the slackers in 1960... The constants in the equation , TEACHERS UNIONS , The growth of administration and liberalism in general. You think the parents should be more involved? In What? I can teach my kid everything he would learn in a public school year in just a few months at home in my spare time... Don’t blame money or crowded classes either ,, students in crowded one room schoolhouses back in the 1800’s graduated 6th grade with more smarts than a college grad today and that was with the teachers time divided among 6 or more grades every day.
Take the ACT sample test here ==>
http://www.actstudent.org/sampletest/index.html
ITS PATHETIC! no wonder the English portion is the best for most kids , it’s graded subjectively while in the math section 1+1 NEVER equals 3
LETS LOWER STANDARDS AGAIN LIKE WE INFLATED SAT GRADING YEARS AGO YIPPEE!!!
My wife used a book from the 1850’s to teach my daughter with. It was tough and had some words I didn’t even know. It was for 8th graders. I had college prep English in 10 grade and we went through 3000 words in half a year. Say what you will there is something wrong with the schools we have today, be it the teachers, the unions, or the administrators.
Speak for your own schools. Ours are great, precisely because the parents in our district are overwhelmingly conservative and hold the school board, principals, and teachers accountable for the quality of our childrens’ educations.
The majority of our HS graduates go on to college, many with a bucketful of college credits already under their belts.
My wife graduated from the same public schools our children are attending. She’s in her 15th year as a Lockheed Martin aerospace engineer. (That’s a “rocket scientist” to those of you in Rio Linda)
I’ll agree with you on the quality of the average college education, though. Especially the non-technical liberal arts degrees.
There's certainly some of that. It isn't the whole story. Many middle class white families invest enormous resources and time into their kids' educations. Their kids get top grades and achieve stellar SAT scores. But because they're white, they have to stand back and watch as self-identified Hispanics and Blacks with much lower GPAs and test scores (and totally disengaged parents) stroll into the most competitive schools ahead of them. Most of these schools (Stanford, for example) also waive tuition for these so-called underrepresented minorities while requiring the middle class white families to pay $30,000 to $50,000 a year.
The system is rigged against white middle class families. They are essentially penalized for making their childrens' school performance and college preparation an important goal and sacrificing to achieve it. They are told that grades and standardized test scores don't matter because they're unduly "discriminatory" against Hispanics and Blacks.
Ethnic Asian families get smacked by the system even worse.
Sure, why not go to college? In Obama’s economy, they haven’t anything else to do.
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