The ACT college entrance test scores for Kentucky’s high school graduates of 2014 released today, and a trend of slow increases in scores continues, as shown below.

However, the data also hint that there was a notable increase in students who took the ACT in 2014 with aggressive testing accommodations. That might have some impact on the reported scores because those lower performing students were not included.

First, those score tables –Table 1 shows the ACT scores for Kentucky graduates by graduation year. All of the students included in this table took the ACT under standard administration conditions including controlled time.

Students who took the ACT with accommodations such as extended time are not included. Until recently ACT didn’t even report their scores to the public.

Table 1 is divided into two sections because ACT participation was voluntary for Kentucky students up through the graduating class of 2008. In 2008, Kentucky began testing all public school juniors with the ACT, thus ACT reports from 2009 on (such as this year’s report for the 2014 graduates) indicate the state tested 100% of all students. The data in Table 1 cover all Kentucky students from public, private and home school programs.

TABLE 1

There are several things to note in Table 1. First, in the old series data before Kentucky moved to 100 percent testing with the ACT (1993 to 2008), there was very little movement in the scores until after 2002. Then, scores began to rise slowly. Between 2002 and 2008, the Composite Scores for all Kentucky students rose 0.9 point, a notable increase. The percentage of high school graduates taking the ACT in Kentucky also was constant at 72 percent in both 2002 and 2008, so the score increase between 2002 and 2008 represents some real improvement and is not just due to a change in the percentage of students taking the ACT. That improvement trend started well before Common Core State Standards came along, of course.

Between 2008 and 2009 the “all student” scores dropped notably, but that was because Kentucky switched to 100 percent testing of all public school students, thus adding a large number of students to the ACT test pool who probably were not very interested in going to college due to their lower performance in high school.

After the switch to 100 percent testing, the ACT composite stayed flat for one year and then began slowly climbing again.

One last point is the number of high school graduates tested under standard conditions during the 2009 to 2014 period grew between 2009 and 2010 and then stayed fairly constant until this year when the number dropped somewhat notably by 825 students. That drop raises questions, as I’ll discuss further below.

Now, let’s look at how Kentucky’s public school students performed on the ACT. Table 2 is similar to the first one, except the data only cover Kentucky public school performance for students who took the test in standard time limits.

TABLE 2

Most of the trends here are similar to those for the combined “all student” data in the first table. ACT Composite Scores were essentially flat from 1993 to 2002; then a small improvement trend started, with scores rising 0.7 point between 2002 and 2008. Again, this trend clearly predates Common Core in Kentucky, which probably didn’t start to really impact classrooms before the 2011-12 school term when the first round of Common Core-aligned testing began.

After 100 percent ACT testing began in 2009, the Kentucky public school scores initially sagged a bit in 2010 and then started to rise, improving by 0.8 point between 2009 and 2014. The number of students tested under standard conditions also rose between 2009 and 2011 and then sort of leveled off at around 41,850 or so for the 2012 and 2013 graduating classes.

In 2014, however, the number of Kentucky public school students tested under standard conditions sagged by 600 students. I don’t have a complete picture about why that happened, but it could lead to scores becoming a bit inflated. Let me explain.

Table 3 compares the number of public school standard time ACT takers from Table 2 to an annual fall Grade 12 public school membership (enrollment) count taken around the beginning of November each school year.

TABLE 3

Notice that the table shows a fairly constant fall 12th grade membership in Kentucky for the past three years. So, we would expect the total number of ACT takers would also remain constant. However, there was a notable increase in 2014 in the disparity between Kentucky public school 12th grade fall enrollment numbers and the number of graduates who took the ACT under standard conditions. The implication is that more students are being tested under alternate conditions on the ACT.

To get a better handle on that, I compared data in Table 1.7 from the 2013 and 2014 editions of the ACT Profile Report – State for Kentucky. I found that overall, public and private school students combined, there had only been an increase of 119 students who got extended time on the ACT but still had scores reported to colleges.

That means the majority of the drop in standard time test takers in Kentucky’s public schools was due to more students getting some of Kentucky’s more extreme testing accommodations while taking the ACT. Those aggressive accommodations that make their ACT results unacceptable for college admissions uses. Furthermore, such aggressive accommodations are only supposed to be offered to students who have the most extreme learning disabilities.

These missing students would, as a group, be expected to score very low on the ACT if they had to take it under standard conditions. Increased removal of such students in 2014 from data reported in Table 2 would be expected to artificially increase the scores in that table. I don’t have the data to determine how much that artificial increase in scores might be.

So, I am left with questions at this time about the reported ACT score increase for public school students in Kentucky in 2014.I think there was a small increase in performance between 2013 and 2014; I just don’t know what that increase would look like if those missing students had not dropped out of both the standard testing and extended-time-but-reportable-to-college testing pools. Possibly, the increase would not be the 0.3 point rise in the ACT Composite for Kentucky public schools shown in Table 2 between 2013 and 2014.What about the non-public school students?

This last table only includes data for students who attended non-public schools in Kentucky such as private, parochial and home school programs. I compute this data algebraically using the “all student” and “public school only” scores from Tables 1 and 2.

TABLE 4

Notice that for more than a decade there has been a fairly continuous decline in the other than public school graduates taking the ACT.

That decline does not make sense when you compare the ACT scores for this non-public group of students to the scores Kentucky’s public schools generate. Very simply, even with some ups and downs in scores for this other than public student group, their overall ACT Composite Scores continue to run several full points higher than the state’s public schools generate. Given that the ACT is scored on a 36-point scale, the score difference is very large.

I’ll close for today, but I have more ACT analysis coming, so stay tuned.

Technical Notes:

The tables above were derived from a very large number of annual reports and analysis of data from the ACT. Here is a listing:

Analysis of: ACT Kentucky Public High School Data Disk, 1997

Analysis of: ACT Kentucky Public High School Data Disk, 1998

Analysis of: ACT Kentucky Public High School Data Disk, 1999

Analysis of: ACT Kentucky Public High School Data Disk, 2000

Analysis of: ACT Kentucky Public High School Data Disk, 2001

Analysis of: ACT Kentucky Public High School Data Disk, 2002

Analysis of: ACT Kentucky Public High School Data Disk, 2003

Analysis of: ACT Kentucky Public High School Data Disk, 2004

Analysis of: ACT Kentucky Public High School Data Disk, 2005

Analysis of: ACT Kentucky Public High School Data Disk, 2006

Analysis of: ACT Kentucky Public High School Data Disk, 2007

Analysis of: ACT Kentucky Public High School Data Disk, 2008

KDE News Release 09-063, 19 Aug 09KDE News Release 10-044, 18 Aug 10

KDE News Release 11-067, 17 Aug 11KDE News Release 12-056, 22 Aug 12

KDE News Release 13-082, 21 Aug 13KDE News Release 14-076, 20 Aug 14

The High School Profile Report, Normative Data, ACT High School Profile Report, H S Graduating Class 1997, St. Composite for Kentucky

The High School Profile Report, Normative Data, ACT High School Profile Report, H S Graduating Class 1998, St. Composite for Kentucky, Code 180-000

The High School Profile Report, Normative Data, ACT High School Profile Report, H S Graduating Class 1999, St. Composite for Kentucky, Code 180-000

The High School Profile Report, Normative Data, ACT High School Profile Report, H S Graduating Class 2000, St. Composite for Kentucky, Code 180-000

The High School Profile Report, Normative Data, ACT High School Profile Report, H S Graduating Class 2001, St. Composite for Kentucky, Code 180-000

The High School Profile Report, Normative Data, ACT High School Profile Report, H S Graduating Class 2002, St. Composite for Kentucky, Code 180-000

The High School Profile Report, Normative Data, ACT High School Profile Report, H S Graduating Class 2003, St. Composite for Kentucky, Code 180-000

The High School Profile Report, Normative Data, ACT High School Profile Report, H S Graduating Class 2004, St. Composite for Kentucky, Code 180-000

The High School Profile Report, Normative Data, ACT High School Profile Report, H S Graduating Class 2005, St. Composite for Kentucky, Code 180-000

ACT High School Profile Report, The Graduating Class 2006, Kentucky

ACT High School Profile Report, The Graduating Class 2007, Kentucky

ACT High School Profile Report, The Graduating Class 2008, Kentucky

ACT High School Profile Report, The Graduating Class 2009, Kentucky

ACT High School Profile Report, The Graduating Class 2010, Kentucky

ACT High School Profile Report, The Graduating Class 2011, Kentucky

ACT High School Profile Report, The Graduating Class 2012, Kentucky

ACT High School Profile Report, The Graduating Class 2013, Kentucky, Standard Time Students Only for 2013 from Table 1.7

ACT High School Profile Report, The Graduating Class 2014, Kentucky, Standard Time Students Only for 2014 from Table 1.7