Less Than 40% Of 2013 High School Grads Will Pass Their College Classes

ACT, the organization behind the test of the same name, released its annualCondition of College And Career Readiness Report for 2013 today and the results are far from heartening. Of those students who graduated high school this spring, only 39% met three or more of the ACT’s college readiness benchmarks, which it defines as a minimum score in the test areas of reading, math, English and science that a student would have to achieve in order to have a 75% chance of passing an intro college class in that same subject.

Even more disturbing is ACT’s finding that 31% of test takers failed to meet a single benchmark – up from 28% in 2012. Of the four tested subjects, students fared the worst in science, with only 36% testing high enough to be able to hold their own in a college-level course. ACT’s 1.8M test takers were best prepared in English, where almost two-thirds met the standard.

More findings of note:

• Students of Asian descent were most likely to meet all four benchmarks (43% did so), while African American students were least likely (5%).
• Students who stuck with a subject for at least three years were more likely to meet the benchmark, with math being the subject area in which persistence most paid off – students who took three or more years of high school math were 39% more likely to surpass ACT’s standard in that subject than those who logged less classroom time.
• Of the 31 states in which at least 40%of 2013 grads took the ACT, only Minnesota and Wisconsin can boast that over 50% of their HS grads could pass at least three out of four entry-level college classes.

In addition to what the test scores themselves indicate, ACT’s report also reveals an unsettling and significant gap between student achievement and aspiration. 87% of test takers, regardless of performance, hoped to earn at least a two-year college degree. And lack of preparedness is not keeping colleges from taking students’ tuition dollars. Of those who went on to higher ed from the class of 2012′s ACT test takers, 40% of those who enrolled in a two-year program and 10% of those who enrolled in a four-year program had failed to meet a single college readiness benchmark in high school.

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