ACT Scores sink, Kentucky’s drop more than the national average

The ACT, Inc. just released the ACT college entrance test results for the high school graduating class of 2022, and the news is pretty grim.

The ACT, Inc.’s own news release summarizes the national declines with comments such as:

  • “The national average ACT Composite score for the high school class of 2022 was 19.8, the lowest average score in more than three decades.”

  • “This is the fifth consecutive year of declines in average scores, a worrisome trend that began long before the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic,” and “These declines are not simply a byproduct of the pandemic. They are further evidence of longtime systemic failures that were exacerbated by the pandemic.”

  • “The magnitude of the declines this year is particularly alarming, as we see rapidly growing numbers of seniors leaving high school without meeting the college-readiness benchmark in any of the subjects we measure.”

  • The average Composite score declined by 0.5 points, from 20.3 in 2021 to 19.8 in 2022. It is the first time that the average Composite score has been below 20.0 since at least as far back as 1991.”

I dug into the specific results for Kentucky, which include all students tested, public school, private school and home school combined. Still, the public school averages will be pretty close to the numbers shown below because only a fairly small percentage of students are from non-public schools.

This first Table shows the Kentucky statewide scores for the years from 2013 on when all graduates in Kentucky’s public schools were tested with the ACT including students tested under normal time limits plus some students who got extended testing time.

As you can see, Kentucky’s Composite Score dropped 0.6 point from 2021, exceeding the national average drop.

Also, the 2022 Kentucky high school graduates’ Composite Score is the lowest ever in this series of scores, which, to reiterate, includes results for students tested in standard time limits plus other students who got extra testing time due to learning disabilities. Only students tested within standard time limits had scores reported in earlier years.

Actually, this 2022 score is lower than any annual ACT Composite for Kentucky all the way back to 2009, which was the first graduating class where all students took the ACT.

Drops in scores for some subjects was even worse than the Composite change. English suffered the most, falling 0.9 point.

You can also see that Kentucky matched the nationwide trend for the year when scores began to fall, 2019, before COVID hit. So, a simple COVID excuse doesn’t explain everything going on here, just as ACT noted in the quotes you see above.

I also took a quick look at the percentages of Kentucky’s white students who met ACT’s College Readiness Benchmark Scores in all four tested areas. Figure 1 shows how that looks.

Figure 1

Per the ACT, fewer than one in five Kentucky white high school graduates in 2022 were fully prepared for a liberal arts education including at least biology and college algebra. That’s really disturbing, but things get downright depressing when we look at how the state’s Black students performed with the Benchmark scoring. Figure 2 shows that.

Figure 2

Very simply, almost no Kentucky Black graduates in the Class of 2022 meet all four ACT College Readiness Benchmarks. Just 3% graduated from high school ready for a full, liberal arts education in college!

That’s just not acceptable.

Note in both Figures 1 and 2 that the declining trend in the Benchmark performance also started before COVID hit. That excuse won’t fully fly.

I hope the Kentucky Supreme Court is paying attention as they deliberate killing House Bill 563 from the 2021 Regular Legislative Session. Continuing the status quo in education in Kentucky isn’t going to do our students, indeed our state, any good.

There is going to be a huge data dump this month concerning scoring, by the way. The Kentucky Report Cards are due to release on October 18th and the National Assessment of Educational Progress results for Grades 4 and 8 in reading and math release on October 24th. Both will give us still more insight into Kentucky’s public education performance, so stay tuned.