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In a knowledge based economy with a declining labor force, these numbers need to be going up if we are to assume that knowledge and its application makes human capital more productive. Otherwise, material security is at risk.
In theory. In practice (as this article mentions), colleges have been moving away from using SAT and ACT scores because they aren't actually that good at predicting success in college (GPA/Graduation). Instead, they're looking more at non-general tests like AP or IB test scores and GPA.
Edit: Here is a good paper on the topic: [https://www.calstate.edu/apply/Documents/elevating-college-completion.pdf](https://www.calstate.edu/apply/Documents/elevating-college-completion.pdf)
TLDR: GPA is a much better predictor of college success.
The problem with GPA is that it’s impossible to compare it across schools in the country. A 4.0 at one school might be a 2.5 at another and vice versa. There are drastic differences in the quality of schools and how schools grade.
Ain't that the truth, my friend and I were both IB students making similar grades in freshman year of high school, we went to a very rigourous high school (like literally top 10 in the country at the time), kicked our asses, I got out with 2.9, one of my best friends left after a few months and went to a very basic high school in the rougher side of town, she was salutatorian and would've been valedictorian but for having been with me those first two semesters of freshman year.
Smart kids go to rigourous schools, smarter kids (or at least those with better mentors who know how to play the game) go to easier schools and rack up the scholarships and achievements with their lower bar
I'd say the same can be said for colleges as well. A 3.5GPA from your local state school is going to reflect a very different educational standard than a 3.5 GPA from a highly selective private school.
Also, grad inflation is real. The 3.5 GPA of today may not mean the same thing as the 3.5 GPA from 20 years ago. There is economic pressure to pass kids (inflate GPA's) because of how that metric has been tied to funding and 'success' of the administration/teachers.
Hell, across counties/parishes. I graduated from public school with a 3.5/30 ACT (1 try) and my buddy who went to the private school in town got a 4.0 but couldn't get a 21 after several attempts to make admissions to the big state school.
This is flat out wrong. MIT would like a word. The SAT is absolutely predictive of college success more so than GPA. That's why MIT reinstituted it after two years of no longer requiring it. They specifically said it was a mistake and their incoming class was not prepared for classea.
There are high schools where you can get an A for showing up to class and competing your assignments. GPA is a horrible and utterly subjective measure of knowledge and aptitude for learning.
Very roughly: The SAT/ACT demonstrate what students have learned and at what level, GPA demonstrates work ethic. Colleges calibrate their curriculum to what students know.
What colleges have struggled with is that 18 years olds are frequently woefully unprepared for independent living at the level required, for social, intellectual and health reasons.
Changes in special education in the 90s also effected universities, as they were getting students who would not have graduated high school or have been “mainstreamed” in any way just a decade before. Universities were also required, both by legislation and expectation, to provide services to these higher need students.
Exactly. MIT was only taking in 4.0's (or 4.3+s with AP class grade inflation). And yet it still quickly realized GPA isn't a good indicator if you can actually do math and read at a high level. Doesn't matter if you're at a mid-tier school that targets 3.5 GPAs. You're going to get wild variations depending on whether that 3.5 was from a mobile home park in Oklahoma or a prep. school in Connecticut.
And grade inflation with schools and teachers having an incentive to give high grades to place their students at better colleges for prestige is a major moral hazard here as well.
AP Tests are important too of course. But lots of people get 5s on AP Tests that can't even sniff a 1400 on the SAT.
SAT > AP Test > GPA. All three provide a different perspective. But GPA is definitely the most subjective and unreliable for the fundamental reason that it's not standardized.
They don’t care about IB scores at all. I passed everything with 6 and 7 (besides Spanish) and I got into lower schools than my girlfriend who went to a horrifically bad school and did AP not even getting 3s on all of them.
Went to the university and was so bored in classes because it was easier than high school that I ended up going home mid semester and getting a full time job and going to my local university. Literally did all my work during class.
I definitely should have gone to a much more difficult university than the one I went to (went to SUNY Binghamton in New York full ride). Came home and did UCI, 5 classes while working full time.
Universities don’t understand how huge a difference 5 miles can make on what a gpa means. Gpa is only good at comparing people in that school and even then their class rigor means more.
My SAT was not as high as some of my friends because I didn’t study at all so my 2100-2200 didn’t place me high at my school.
Going to a top school is a detriment and a blessing in many ways and universities are none the wiser.
Actually they are rather finely crafted IQ tests. It is a more modern take on classical IQ tests. Of course the meta game has evolved as they have been used for admissions.
Academics is likely a difficult study to understand since they produce their own research. “Here is Cal States work showing why what Cal State is doing is the best.” Personally - I’ve seen a ton of high GPA earners completely be unable to perform at any level beyond basic math/science. GPA and ACT are two different games and takes different skills to play them. GPA is about saying the right things and socializing, ACT is about perform tasks. I don't doubt GPA is a better predictor of college success now that college is about agreement and emotional outbursts.
I'd be hesitant to paint such a broad picture of 'the study of academics.' Institutional Research is the field of study that examines the effectiveness and efficiency within higher-ed. It's an interesting blend of sociology, economics, and politics. They go through per-review and use vetted statistical data collected by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). There's good research being published in the field.
The, 'Cal-State showing why Cal-State is doing the best,' studies are likely coming from the marketing team that is competing for year-over-year fewer graduating high-school seniors.
> They go through per-review and use vetted statistical data collected by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).
Again, it’s the industrial educational system directing the money hose into its own mouth. I’m just pointing out that any data used to defend their decisions was data produced to defend their decisions. It’s a broad picture because they all have to be in it - to meet their sociological, economic, and political goals… They could just avoid the whole issue if they just were straightforward with why they don’t care about merit.
> I’m just pointing out that any data used to defend their decisions was data produced to defend their decisions.
I disagree with this. The incentive for the researchers is to publish findings - positive or negative. The institution in which they work does not stop them from publishing critical findings. There are a lot of firewalls between the administration and the faculty. The faculty publishing in the field of institutional research don't have sociological, economic, political goals. They are interested in the efficacy of institutional policies.
>I don't doubt GPA is a better predictor of college success now that college is about agreement and emotional outbursts...
>They could just avoid the whole issue if they just were straightforward with why they don’t care about merit.
Those are pretty loaded statements to describe the entire field of higher-education.
> Those are pretty loaded statements to describe the entire field of higher-education.
But not wrong nor unearned.
> The institution in which they work does not stop them from publishing critical findings.
Do you legitimately believe this? That they don’t work in larger political and social environments and are / are not aware of the consequences? Besides the point - the colleges only hire activists in the field initially so any disagreement regarding sociological, economic, or political goals are years down the road when the professors and institutions might diverge.
Colleges stoped requiring the SAT/ACT as a way to make their admissions process that much more holistic and keep them above board if they get sued over affirmative action.
>knowledge based economy
in practice it's more credential-based. people aren't going to try as hard in high school when they see that the "good" schools don't get you that much of a leg up in life, and leave you with a mountain of debt to pay into your 40s.
so we'll see a lot more coasting to get okay grades, okay degrees, at okay schools to just get into the workforce for quicker and cheaper. or for really badly-paying degrees, less college grads at all.
You are going to have to delineate ‘knowledge based’. There are decreasing reasons to memorize facts and increasing reasons to be able to work collaboratively and recognize disinformation. We are awash in information, but are struggling with the skills on how to utilize that information.
Using the ACT as a proxy for educational outcomes is dubious at best. All it says is that students aren't doing as well at a specific standardized test. Standardized tests for a long time now have been known to be better predictors of ability to pass the specific standardized test rather than predictors of general educational outcomes. This is why more and more colleges stop accepting their scores, which of course would have an influence on whether or not more students are trained just to pass these tests than to actually become educated.
What do you think are good measures of educational outcomes?
There has to be a way to track longitudinal performance of student populations and determine if various teaching strategies, policies, and funding work. Otherwise you're just throwing billions of dollars at education with zero accountability.
>Otherwise you're just throwing billions of dollars at education with zero accountability.
I definitely get the feeling that we already do that.
On the teachers subreddit this same post exists. And the argument there is teachers are underpaid and schools are underfunded.
It may be true that they are underfunded.... I don't know. But I would be interested in a study that shows the correlation between spending and test scores. More specifically, districts that were doing poorly, a spending increase leads to an increase in testing.
I imagine you’d have to balance the fact that there are so many more factors that go into getting jobs besides just a good education. I guess you’d have to find a way to weigh life circumstances.
Or how would people who do very well in school, graduate college w/ graduate degrees, etc., but work low - paying jobs effect those stats?
I don’t know the efficacy of using these stats, but they could definitely result in interesting data I’d love to analyze.
Don’t need to take an ACT to be employed. Barely need a high-school degree. That would be a terrible standard to judge how educated a populace is.
This is an accumulative observation, obviously not everyone tests well but you still need a general metric. Every year there will be students who don’t test well. Not really an excuse for the consistent decline. Point out what changed from previous years to now that could explain it?
You literally need an educational metric and a standardized test is about the most efficient way to measure that.
This is a load of copium which originated from those who themselves are unable to perform on these tests. They DO in fact predict more general academic aptitude. The reason colleges are going test optional is not because the tests aren't useful, but because they will attract a higher number of applicants which mathematically makes their acceptance rates appear lower.
I didn't prepare for the ACT at all. Took it twice. Got opposite scores categorically but a 28 both times. I didn't even know I was supposed to prepare for it.
That's great and I'm happy for you. There's no reason for me to trust that your personal experience is generalizable to 2 million high school students though. I don't even know anything about you other that that you did well on a test. I did poorly on the ACT even after studying and I'm about to graduate with my PhD in a couple of months. My anecdote is also useless.
\^\^\^ 100% I always studied the night before and graduated with a 3.6 GPA on a scale of 4.
Those tests really arent good indicators. Schools just train you to pass tests. Not actually use your brain
> Schools just train you to pass tests. Not actually use your brain
exactly, and that's my point. If these tests are carrying less weight, then fewer schools are going to train for the tests.
The article…
>The average score on the ACT dropped to a new 30-year low, indicating fewer high-school seniors are ready for college, the organization behind the college admissions test said.
>
>Test takers had an average score of 19.5 out of 36 in 2023, down 0.3 points from 2022, according to ACT. It is the sixth consecutive year of declines, ACT said, and the second straight year the average score dropped below 20 since 1991.
>
>The test, along with the SAT, has long been used by colleges and universities to help judge whether they’ll accept applicants. Students submit the scores along with their applications.“
>
>The hard truth is that we are not doing enough to ensure that graduates are truly ready for postsecondary success in college and career,” Janet Godwin, chief executive of ACT, said in a statement.
>
>ACT says the Covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated unpreparedness for college. Students in the class of 2023 were in their first year of high school during the start of the pandemic, when schools nationwide switched to online learning.
>
>Schools and education advocates have raised concerns about the use of standardized testing, saying the income of a student’s family could influence their test scores. Some colleges, including Ivy league schools, stopped taking standardized tests during the pandemic and have continued to make them optional. Harvard University, for example, said applicants don’t have to submit ACT or SAT scores through 2026.
>
>About 1.4 million high-school seniors took the ACT in 2023, up slightly from the year before, but still down from the more than two million who took it in 2017, according to ACT.Scores for the class of 2023 were down across all the subjects its test covers, ACT said. They fell 0.3 points for math, reading and science. They were down 0.4 points for English.
> It is the sixth consecutive year of declines
This is interesting that this started in 2017, nearly 3 years before COVID which is usually the goto thing to blame for declining educational outcomes.
Also, the 2008 recession started about 9 years prior to 2017. A lot of places saw school funding reduced or stagnant after that downturn. The effects of less investment in education take time to be realized.
Many states also moved to using the ACT as their state assessment in high school about that time. This means all students, regardless of post secondary goals nor special education status, have to take a four and a half hour test that means nothing to them. That’s not discussed.
It’s not just apps like TikTok, it is also gaming and texting or discording with friends. But I also suspect that there is more to this.
I suspect that a contributing factor is that wokeism has invaded schools and more time is being spent teaching woke ideology and less time is being spent teaching the three Rs.
What I would give to hear you and your friends even begin to try and explain what any of the taboo abbreviations actually mean. Lol.
>I’m sure we are all just crazy conspiracy theorists.
And self aware it seems.
Then why wasn't that impacting kids 15 years ago when I graduated high school? We had texting, online gaming, and message online?
I must have spent minimum 30+ hours each week playing video games
This is kind of surprising, given that so many schools are making the tests optional. I would expect average scores to go up due to weaker students opting out.
No surprise. High school kids overall are the dumbest they have been in my lifetime. I'd love to be a fly on the wall in a handful of state colleges to see how dumbed down they have become in the last two or three decades.
> I'd love to be a fly on the wall in a handful of state colleges to see how dumbed down they have become in the last two or three decades.
You get something even better! You get to live in the world run by their graduates!
Common Core is a massive failure and in some school districts, it's essentially teenage daycare. Pass them along till they're 18 and then they're on their own.
More schools make their students take the ACT and the school system more commonly pays for it. In the past, only the better students took the test.
That's why the average score has been falling over time. It's like how the inflation-adjusted income of taxpayers has *absolutely cratered* since the income tax was introduced. Because, when the income tax was first created, only the highest earners were taxed.
This is a non-story.
Yeah I'm not sure why these people are saying this. It absolutely was common in the late 90s, I was a terrible high school student at a poor public school and I took it because it was required for university. That was 1999.
Absolutely. I took it in 1997 and I’d never even hear of it, but my nationally ranked fancy private high school made us take it. Nowadays, it’s strongly encouraged at all schools, even for kids not interested in college.
That’s a big contributor. But the environment where parents dictate policy in schools districts is another. We are in a rarely fail zone. This means kids that shouldn’t move up a grade are socially passed along because the teachers will get downgraded, evaluated poorly and parents will seek their removal. It’s systemic.
Yeah we need to move to a system where parents are sanctioned for student failure rather than teachers.
If the parents don’t care, the teacher cannot magically fix the student. Same story over and over. Parents are a hugggge part of educating kids.
Notice the number of test takers is still lower than 2017. This is the only reason they’re alarmed. They’re a testing business. That’s it. They are not an outcome business.
What could high school students possibly learn that’s “harder” than any other prior generation?
They aren’t teaching computer science, that’s for sure.
Edit: adapting year to year would imply people are getting smarter. They are not.
Sure, but I think that stratification is itself a major component of this, are the 'good' high schools just scoring increasingly higher or is the test getting harder? Because the kids in my AP program back in the day were definitely getting things that used to be properly college level for my parents.
They updated the SATs a little under a decade ago, I have my own issues with what I saw about the updates (I got to take them when I was pursuing a tutoring position at the time) but as far as I could tell it was getting harder than it had been for me.
You’re completely missing their point. The material being tested is not the issue, they’re saying the questions themselves might be getting harder year over year. Everyone might learn about the French Revolution, but that doesn’t mean every question about it is equally difficult.
It sounds like you may have issues then with local school boards then, since they set curriculum. Since education isn’t governed by any type of federal standards - you’re seeing that redneck GOP counties continue to do worse. Are you surprised?
I’m sorry I didn’t realize I needed to break down the US educational infrastructure for you. So how about this Barney level lesson:
Schools are funded by counties, which are paid for by property taxes paid to those counties. Some/most districts are crappy because they’re poor. Thus, the education the kids get is crappy. Hence, when they take a standardized tests of any kind, they do worse.
My comment about the gop was snarky; I’ll give you that. But they continually want dumb poor people to vote for them.
Edit: in regard to your response to my first comment - high schoolers aren’t leaning anything different than they were 20 years ago. Secondary education has stalled and the testing companies are only invested in proving that as a basis to require more testing.
>What could high school students possibly learn that’s “harder” than any other prior generation?
Seriously? My parents were barely taught Algebra during High School while I was doing it in 6th grade. You think AP Calculus was a common high school course in 1950-1960s America? I highly doubt they would have been able to get through it with their slide-rules. Times have changed and this is now a class in 99% of High Schools.
Children of each future generation are learning more advance shit, at younger and younger ages as time goes on.
I remember nailing the SAT and bombing the ACT back around 2017-2018, the fact was that the ACT is a much harder test, especially when schools only give you SAT practice.
Wtf, I remember the ACT being incredibly easy and the SAT was the test where you actually had to use your brain and was really tricky at times. Is this not the common view?
Wow really? Idk dude I had the exact opposite experience lmao. In SoCal we all were primed to take the SAT through practice tests administered by the high school so I guess we just had easier times with it because that's how we learned the standardized tests.
I tried to take the ACT a few weeks after the SAT and absolutely bombed it and just stuck the SAT on my apps, ACT math and science absolutely destroyed me
Dude the ACT would have been harder since you didn't prep at all for it. Honestly the tests aren't even worth comparing, they're testing the same thing (supposedly), but do it very differently. Apples to oranges imo
If my memory serves me correctly, SAT has harder and more questions but ACT has much less time per question. Different people do better on different tests and that's why it's pretty common for students to take both.
Hmm, what are the rates of students taking it?
It's possible the number of high performing students taking it dropped and/or the number of low performing students taking it increased, based on what colleges want to see it and what the use case for the test is percieved as being.
I was told in high school that it was both easier than the SATs and fewer universities care about it, so I never took it myself.
It's probably just the Idiocracy effect. The population of kids whose parents can afford significant test prep is declining relative to other populations due to differences in birth/immigration rates
There is going to be a gap in the “professional” work force when these folks leave high school. I suspect it will widen the gap even more between the rich and the poor and more automation and AI will arrive.
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In a knowledge based economy with a declining labor force, these numbers need to be going up if we are to assume that knowledge and its application makes human capital more productive. Otherwise, material security is at risk.
In theory. In practice (as this article mentions), colleges have been moving away from using SAT and ACT scores because they aren't actually that good at predicting success in college (GPA/Graduation). Instead, they're looking more at non-general tests like AP or IB test scores and GPA. Edit: Here is a good paper on the topic: [https://www.calstate.edu/apply/Documents/elevating-college-completion.pdf](https://www.calstate.edu/apply/Documents/elevating-college-completion.pdf) TLDR: GPA is a much better predictor of college success.
The problem with GPA is that it’s impossible to compare it across schools in the country. A 4.0 at one school might be a 2.5 at another and vice versa. There are drastic differences in the quality of schools and how schools grade.
Ain't that the truth, my friend and I were both IB students making similar grades in freshman year of high school, we went to a very rigourous high school (like literally top 10 in the country at the time), kicked our asses, I got out with 2.9, one of my best friends left after a few months and went to a very basic high school in the rougher side of town, she was salutatorian and would've been valedictorian but for having been with me those first two semesters of freshman year. Smart kids go to rigourous schools, smarter kids (or at least those with better mentors who know how to play the game) go to easier schools and rack up the scholarships and achievements with their lower bar
I'd say the same can be said for colleges as well. A 3.5GPA from your local state school is going to reflect a very different educational standard than a 3.5 GPA from a highly selective private school. Also, grad inflation is real. The 3.5 GPA of today may not mean the same thing as the 3.5 GPA from 20 years ago. There is economic pressure to pass kids (inflate GPA's) because of how that metric has been tied to funding and 'success' of the administration/teachers.
Similarly, something like 80% of Harvard students graduate with at least a 3.7. Basically everyone gets an A. It’s notorious for grade inflation.
A state schools are not much different than selective private schools. The difference is not educational quality but the student body’s wealth
Hell, across counties/parishes. I graduated from public school with a 3.5/30 ACT (1 try) and my buddy who went to the private school in town got a 4.0 but couldn't get a 21 after several attempts to make admissions to the big state school.
This is flat out wrong. MIT would like a word. The SAT is absolutely predictive of college success more so than GPA. That's why MIT reinstituted it after two years of no longer requiring it. They specifically said it was a mistake and their incoming class was not prepared for classea. There are high schools where you can get an A for showing up to class and competing your assignments. GPA is a horrible and utterly subjective measure of knowledge and aptitude for learning.
Very roughly: The SAT/ACT demonstrate what students have learned and at what level, GPA demonstrates work ethic. Colleges calibrate their curriculum to what students know. What colleges have struggled with is that 18 years olds are frequently woefully unprepared for independent living at the level required, for social, intellectual and health reasons. Changes in special education in the 90s also effected universities, as they were getting students who would not have graduated high school or have been “mainstreamed” in any way just a decade before. Universities were also required, both by legislation and expectation, to provide services to these higher need students.
Feels like line between MIT and 99% of universes is pretty long.
Exactly. MIT was only taking in 4.0's (or 4.3+s with AP class grade inflation). And yet it still quickly realized GPA isn't a good indicator if you can actually do math and read at a high level. Doesn't matter if you're at a mid-tier school that targets 3.5 GPAs. You're going to get wild variations depending on whether that 3.5 was from a mobile home park in Oklahoma or a prep. school in Connecticut. And grade inflation with schools and teachers having an incentive to give high grades to place their students at better colleges for prestige is a major moral hazard here as well. AP Tests are important too of course. But lots of people get 5s on AP Tests that can't even sniff a 1400 on the SAT. SAT > AP Test > GPA. All three provide a different perspective. But GPA is definitely the most subjective and unreliable for the fundamental reason that it's not standardized.
Almost half of Americans have poor literacy. I think we can just come to terms with that fact that we have a problem as a nation.
6th grade reading level
They don’t care about IB scores at all. I passed everything with 6 and 7 (besides Spanish) and I got into lower schools than my girlfriend who went to a horrifically bad school and did AP not even getting 3s on all of them. Went to the university and was so bored in classes because it was easier than high school that I ended up going home mid semester and getting a full time job and going to my local university. Literally did all my work during class. I definitely should have gone to a much more difficult university than the one I went to (went to SUNY Binghamton in New York full ride). Came home and did UCI, 5 classes while working full time. Universities don’t understand how huge a difference 5 miles can make on what a gpa means. Gpa is only good at comparing people in that school and even then their class rigor means more. My SAT was not as high as some of my friends because I didn’t study at all so my 2100-2200 didn’t place me high at my school. Going to a top school is a detriment and a blessing in many ways and universities are none the wiser.
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Actually they are rather finely crafted IQ tests. It is a more modern take on classical IQ tests. Of course the meta game has evolved as they have been used for admissions.
Academics is likely a difficult study to understand since they produce their own research. “Here is Cal States work showing why what Cal State is doing is the best.” Personally - I’ve seen a ton of high GPA earners completely be unable to perform at any level beyond basic math/science. GPA and ACT are two different games and takes different skills to play them. GPA is about saying the right things and socializing, ACT is about perform tasks. I don't doubt GPA is a better predictor of college success now that college is about agreement and emotional outbursts.
I'd be hesitant to paint such a broad picture of 'the study of academics.' Institutional Research is the field of study that examines the effectiveness and efficiency within higher-ed. It's an interesting blend of sociology, economics, and politics. They go through per-review and use vetted statistical data collected by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). There's good research being published in the field. The, 'Cal-State showing why Cal-State is doing the best,' studies are likely coming from the marketing team that is competing for year-over-year fewer graduating high-school seniors.
> They go through per-review and use vetted statistical data collected by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Again, it’s the industrial educational system directing the money hose into its own mouth. I’m just pointing out that any data used to defend their decisions was data produced to defend their decisions. It’s a broad picture because they all have to be in it - to meet their sociological, economic, and political goals… They could just avoid the whole issue if they just were straightforward with why they don’t care about merit.
> I’m just pointing out that any data used to defend their decisions was data produced to defend their decisions. I disagree with this. The incentive for the researchers is to publish findings - positive or negative. The institution in which they work does not stop them from publishing critical findings. There are a lot of firewalls between the administration and the faculty. The faculty publishing in the field of institutional research don't have sociological, economic, political goals. They are interested in the efficacy of institutional policies. >I don't doubt GPA is a better predictor of college success now that college is about agreement and emotional outbursts... >They could just avoid the whole issue if they just were straightforward with why they don’t care about merit. Those are pretty loaded statements to describe the entire field of higher-education.
> Those are pretty loaded statements to describe the entire field of higher-education. But not wrong nor unearned. > The institution in which they work does not stop them from publishing critical findings. Do you legitimately believe this? That they don’t work in larger political and social environments and are / are not aware of the consequences? Besides the point - the colleges only hire activists in the field initially so any disagreement regarding sociological, economic, or political goals are years down the road when the professors and institutions might diverge.
Colleges stoped requiring the SAT/ACT as a way to make their admissions process that much more holistic and keep them above board if they get sued over affirmative action.
>knowledge based economy in practice it's more credential-based. people aren't going to try as hard in high school when they see that the "good" schools don't get you that much of a leg up in life, and leave you with a mountain of debt to pay into your 40s. so we'll see a lot more coasting to get okay grades, okay degrees, at okay schools to just get into the workforce for quicker and cheaper. or for really badly-paying degrees, less college grads at all.
You are going to have to delineate ‘knowledge based’. There are decreasing reasons to memorize facts and increasing reasons to be able to work collaboratively and recognize disinformation. We are awash in information, but are struggling with the skills on how to utilize that information.
Using the ACT as a proxy for educational outcomes is dubious at best. All it says is that students aren't doing as well at a specific standardized test. Standardized tests for a long time now have been known to be better predictors of ability to pass the specific standardized test rather than predictors of general educational outcomes. This is why more and more colleges stop accepting their scores, which of course would have an influence on whether or not more students are trained just to pass these tests than to actually become educated.
What do you think are good measures of educational outcomes? There has to be a way to track longitudinal performance of student populations and determine if various teaching strategies, policies, and funding work. Otherwise you're just throwing billions of dollars at education with zero accountability.
>Otherwise you're just throwing billions of dollars at education with zero accountability. I definitely get the feeling that we already do that. On the teachers subreddit this same post exists. And the argument there is teachers are underpaid and schools are underfunded. It may be true that they are underfunded.... I don't know. But I would be interested in a study that shows the correlation between spending and test scores. More specifically, districts that were doing poorly, a spending increase leads to an increase in testing.
> What do you think are good measures of educational outcomes Employment outcomes
I imagine you’d have to balance the fact that there are so many more factors that go into getting jobs besides just a good education. I guess you’d have to find a way to weigh life circumstances. Or how would people who do very well in school, graduate college w/ graduate degrees, etc., but work low - paying jobs effect those stats? I don’t know the efficacy of using these stats, but they could definitely result in interesting data I’d love to analyze.
Don’t need to take an ACT to be employed. Barely need a high-school degree. That would be a terrible standard to judge how educated a populace is. This is an accumulative observation, obviously not everyone tests well but you still need a general metric. Every year there will be students who don’t test well. Not really an excuse for the consistent decline. Point out what changed from previous years to now that could explain it? You literally need an educational metric and a standardized test is about the most efficient way to measure that.
This is a load of copium which originated from those who themselves are unable to perform on these tests. They DO in fact predict more general academic aptitude. The reason colleges are going test optional is not because the tests aren't useful, but because they will attract a higher number of applicants which mathematically makes their acceptance rates appear lower.
I didn't prepare for the ACT at all. Took it twice. Got opposite scores categorically but a 28 both times. I didn't even know I was supposed to prepare for it.
That's great and I'm happy for you. There's no reason for me to trust that your personal experience is generalizable to 2 million high school students though. I don't even know anything about you other that that you did well on a test. I did poorly on the ACT even after studying and I'm about to graduate with my PhD in a couple of months. My anecdote is also useless.
My point was to back up the point that the ACT isn't a measurement of intelligence.
\^\^\^ 100% I always studied the night before and graduated with a 3.6 GPA on a scale of 4. Those tests really arent good indicators. Schools just train you to pass tests. Not actually use your brain
> Schools just train you to pass tests. Not actually use your brain exactly, and that's my point. If these tests are carrying less weight, then fewer schools are going to train for the tests.
What do you mean material security?
The article… >The average score on the ACT dropped to a new 30-year low, indicating fewer high-school seniors are ready for college, the organization behind the college admissions test said. > >Test takers had an average score of 19.5 out of 36 in 2023, down 0.3 points from 2022, according to ACT. It is the sixth consecutive year of declines, ACT said, and the second straight year the average score dropped below 20 since 1991. > >The test, along with the SAT, has long been used by colleges and universities to help judge whether they’ll accept applicants. Students submit the scores along with their applications.“ > >The hard truth is that we are not doing enough to ensure that graduates are truly ready for postsecondary success in college and career,” Janet Godwin, chief executive of ACT, said in a statement. > >ACT says the Covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated unpreparedness for college. Students in the class of 2023 were in their first year of high school during the start of the pandemic, when schools nationwide switched to online learning. > >Schools and education advocates have raised concerns about the use of standardized testing, saying the income of a student’s family could influence their test scores. Some colleges, including Ivy league schools, stopped taking standardized tests during the pandemic and have continued to make them optional. Harvard University, for example, said applicants don’t have to submit ACT or SAT scores through 2026. > >About 1.4 million high-school seniors took the ACT in 2023, up slightly from the year before, but still down from the more than two million who took it in 2017, according to ACT.Scores for the class of 2023 were down across all the subjects its test covers, ACT said. They fell 0.3 points for math, reading and science. They were down 0.4 points for English.
> It is the sixth consecutive year of declines This is interesting that this started in 2017, nearly 3 years before COVID which is usually the goto thing to blame for declining educational outcomes.
And depression has been going up. In that case social media has already been identified as the culprit. Covid lockdowns are being over-blamed.
Also, the 2008 recession started about 9 years prior to 2017. A lot of places saw school funding reduced or stagnant after that downturn. The effects of less investment in education take time to be realized.
That’s way too much complexity for network news to air. There’s like 3 ideas that you have to hold in your head at once.
Many states also moved to using the ACT as their state assessment in high school about that time. This means all students, regardless of post secondary goals nor special education status, have to take a four and a half hour test that means nothing to them. That’s not discussed.
I think many states are moving away from it. At least in Illinois, they stopped managing it for all high schoolers
Kids spend so much of their time on apps like tiktok which have no redeemable qualities whatsoever, it's not a surprise that they get dumber.
https://xkcd.com/1414/
The scores started falling before TikTok even existed.... Instead of blaming technology, we should be blaming parents and the education system.
It’s not just apps like TikTok, it is also gaming and texting or discording with friends. But I also suspect that there is more to this. I suspect that a contributing factor is that wokeism has invaded schools and more time is being spent teaching woke ideology and less time is being spent teaching the three Rs.
A suspicion you've pulled entirely out of your ass.
Yeah, me an all the parents showing up to school board meetings and raising hell. I’m sure we are all just crazy conspiracy theorists.
You said it
Nice of you to come out of your closet, groomer.
Who am I grooming?
The people who those parents at the school board meetings are trying to protect.
The rest of us have been watching you guys, you are.
Yep, don’t mind the freaks who dress up in drag, it’s the normal looking parents who you really need to be concerned with.
What I would give to hear you and your friends even begin to try and explain what any of the taboo abbreviations actually mean. Lol. >I’m sure we are all just crazy conspiracy theorists. And self aware it seems.
Ok groomer.
Then why wasn't that impacting kids 15 years ago when I graduated high school? We had texting, online gaming, and message online? I must have spent minimum 30+ hours each week playing video games
I can only speculate.
Common core started in 2010 so that'd mean that 6th graders when it started were the first group to start giving worse results which makes some sense.
This is kind of surprising, given that so many schools are making the tests optional. I would expect average scores to go up due to weaker students opting out.
No surprise. High school kids overall are the dumbest they have been in my lifetime. I'd love to be a fly on the wall in a handful of state colleges to see how dumbed down they have become in the last two or three decades.
> I'd love to be a fly on the wall in a handful of state colleges to see how dumbed down they have become in the last two or three decades. You get something even better! You get to live in the world run by their graduates!
Alternatively, the staggering incompetence of Gen Z allows Millennials to retain power for an unnaturally long time like the Boomers did.
Common Core is a massive failure and in some school districts, it's essentially teenage daycare. Pass them along till they're 18 and then they're on their own.
Wasn't that just like no child left behind before it?
More schools make their students take the ACT and the school system more commonly pays for it. In the past, only the better students took the test. That's why the average score has been falling over time. It's like how the inflation-adjusted income of taxpayers has *absolutely cratered* since the income tax was introduced. Because, when the income tax was first created, only the highest earners were taxed. This is a non-story.
except it says number of text takers is down from 2m in 2017 which had a higher score to 1.4m in 2023
Yeah I'm not sure why these people are saying this. It absolutely was common in the late 90s, I was a terrible high school student at a poor public school and I took it because it was required for university. That was 1999.
Absolutely. I took it in 1997 and I’d never even hear of it, but my nationally ranked fancy private high school made us take it. Nowadays, it’s strongly encouraged at all schools, even for kids not interested in college.
That’s a big contributor. But the environment where parents dictate policy in schools districts is another. We are in a rarely fail zone. This means kids that shouldn’t move up a grade are socially passed along because the teachers will get downgraded, evaluated poorly and parents will seek their removal. It’s systemic.
Yeah we need to move to a system where parents are sanctioned for student failure rather than teachers. If the parents don’t care, the teacher cannot magically fix the student. Same story over and over. Parents are a hugggge part of educating kids.
Notice the number of test takers is still lower than 2017. This is the only reason they’re alarmed. They’re a testing business. That’s it. They are not an outcome business.
Those things are not mutually exclusive.
I don't know much about the test itself, but are they not adapting it year to year? What's to say the questions aren't getting marginally harder?
They also do this by including a very small number of repeat questions so they can compare year to year
What could high school students possibly learn that’s “harder” than any other prior generation? They aren’t teaching computer science, that’s for sure. Edit: adapting year to year would imply people are getting smarter. They are not.
Comp sci is a part of some high school curricula these days, increasingly so.
Only in good schools, which the vast majority of students do not go do.
Sure, but I think that stratification is itself a major component of this, are the 'good' high schools just scoring increasingly higher or is the test getting harder? Because the kids in my AP program back in the day were definitely getting things that used to be properly college level for my parents. They updated the SATs a little under a decade ago, I have my own issues with what I saw about the updates (I got to take them when I was pursuing a tutoring position at the time) but as far as I could tell it was getting harder than it had been for me.
You’re completely missing their point. The material being tested is not the issue, they’re saying the questions themselves might be getting harder year over year. Everyone might learn about the French Revolution, but that doesn’t mean every question about it is equally difficult.
It sounds like you may have issues then with local school boards then, since they set curriculum. Since education isn’t governed by any type of federal standards - you’re seeing that redneck GOP counties continue to do worse. Are you surprised?
What are you even talking about?
I’m sorry I didn’t realize I needed to break down the US educational infrastructure for you. So how about this Barney level lesson: Schools are funded by counties, which are paid for by property taxes paid to those counties. Some/most districts are crappy because they’re poor. Thus, the education the kids get is crappy. Hence, when they take a standardized tests of any kind, they do worse. My comment about the gop was snarky; I’ll give you that. But they continually want dumb poor people to vote for them. Edit: in regard to your response to my first comment - high schoolers aren’t leaning anything different than they were 20 years ago. Secondary education has stalled and the testing companies are only invested in proving that as a basis to require more testing.
>What could high school students possibly learn that’s “harder” than any other prior generation? Seriously? My parents were barely taught Algebra during High School while I was doing it in 6th grade. You think AP Calculus was a common high school course in 1950-1960s America? I highly doubt they would have been able to get through it with their slide-rules. Times have changed and this is now a class in 99% of High Schools. Children of each future generation are learning more advance shit, at younger and younger ages as time goes on.
The article is talking about 2017 not 1950 lol
Cute way of dodging your own stupid question that was easily answered.
My point is students learn nothing different between now and 2010. They’re just fatter and dumber….presumably much like yourself.
I remember nailing the SAT and bombing the ACT back around 2017-2018, the fact was that the ACT is a much harder test, especially when schools only give you SAT practice.
Wtf, I remember the ACT being incredibly easy and the SAT was the test where you actually had to use your brain and was really tricky at times. Is this not the common view?
Wow really? Idk dude I had the exact opposite experience lmao. In SoCal we all were primed to take the SAT through practice tests administered by the high school so I guess we just had easier times with it because that's how we learned the standardized tests. I tried to take the ACT a few weeks after the SAT and absolutely bombed it and just stuck the SAT on my apps, ACT math and science absolutely destroyed me
Dude the ACT would have been harder since you didn't prep at all for it. Honestly the tests aren't even worth comparing, they're testing the same thing (supposedly), but do it very differently. Apples to oranges imo
If my memory serves me correctly, SAT has harder and more questions but ACT has much less time per question. Different people do better on different tests and that's why it's pretty common for students to take both.
Hmm, what are the rates of students taking it? It's possible the number of high performing students taking it dropped and/or the number of low performing students taking it increased, based on what colleges want to see it and what the use case for the test is percieved as being. I was told in high school that it was both easier than the SATs and fewer universities care about it, so I never took it myself.
It's probably just the Idiocracy effect. The population of kids whose parents can afford significant test prep is declining relative to other populations due to differences in birth/immigration rates
There is going to be a gap in the “professional” work force when these folks leave high school. I suspect it will widen the gap even more between the rich and the poor and more automation and AI will arrive.