North Carolina is changing its high school assessments and will begin testing all of its juniors with the ACT college entrance test.

This past year, nine states tested all, or nearly all, of their high school graduates with the ACT. This provides these states with valuable information about how well they are preparing students for college and careers.

In 2011, only 18 percent of North Carolina’s graduates took the ACT, however, making it impossible to draw valid conclusions about relative performance that state and in the high ACT participation states shown in the graph below.

When states test all of their students, it becomes possible to do meaningful comparisons between those states with the ACT. Soon, we can add North Carolina to the graph above.