ACT, Inc., just released the ACT college entrance test score results for the high school graduating class of 2023, and the story isn’t pretty.

The graph shows how Kentucky’s ACT Composite Score has tracked over the past decade. As you can see, overall, the scores for all Kentucky graduates, public and private/home school combined, has barely budged from last year and remains far below the best performance, posted pre-COVID, by the Class of 2018. A lot of ground was lost, at the very least.

Keep in mind, the ACT score scale only runs to 36 points, so the drop here is especially concerning.

Things get a lot worse when we break the Kentucky results down by race.

 The top half of the table shows scores for white students in Kentucky only.

Kentucky’s low scores for white students from 2022 were repeated in 2023 in all subjects except English. Apparently, that lone improvement area was enough to nudge the Composite Score up by 0.1 point, as well, but this isn’t an encouraging picture.

The story for Kentucky’s Black students, already bleak before COVID hit, got a bit worse in math, reading and science in 2023. The Composite for Kentucky’s Black students only stayed stable due to the slight increase in ACT English.

Clearly, COVID is taken a continuing toll on Kentucky’s students, but due note in the tables and the graph that things were starting to slide for our students after 2018, which is before the pandemic started.

Tech Note: The ACT Data Visualization Tool is online here.