ACT Scores Are Down. Grades Are Up. Something’s Fishy.
High school students’ grades keep getting better, but standardized tests tell a different story. According to new research, while grade inflation is continuing to drive high school grades up, students are slipping on more objective measures of learning. As more and more colleges are turning away from a recent shift towards test-optional admissions, this data indicates that asking students for their standardized test scores is increasingly necessary to gauge learning.Â
Last month, the ACT released research indicating that student GPA in the post-COVID-19 era has declined in its power to predict student success in college. In contrast, standardized test scores stayed relatively stable in their ability to predict whether students will receive passing grades in their first year of college.
According to researchers, the average high school GPA, measured on a 4.0 scale, has risen slightly since 2017, increasing from 3.44 to 3.59. While ACT scores stayed fairly stable from the mid-90s to 2019, they faltered during and after the pandemic, declining from 20.7 on a 36-point scale in 2019 to 19.5 in 2023. The decline was particularly steep between 2021 and 2022, falling from 20.3 to 19.8. While these drops seem small, they portend a significant problem.
“When we’re talking about over a million students, then seeing a half-point drop in one year is a big decline….We haven’t seen a change like that in the last 10 years or even in the last 30 years,” Rose Babington, senior director for state partnerships at ACT, told Reason in 2022.Â
“For colleges, these findings indicate that using high school grade point average without a
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