This year’s dip is not enough to raise alarm for Nebraska Commissioner of Education Matt Blomstedt, who attributed it to “natural variability”.
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Christian County High School scores dropped in English, reading and science, but stayed the same in math.
A survey of the freshman class at Waccamaw High found 75 percent plan to attend college.
The ACT became optional for IL public school students in 2015 after 14 years of being required of all public school juniors. Blomstedt said he’d recommend which test he prefers to the State Board of Education next week. In social science, 58 percent of Stockton’s test takers reached levels showing they would be able to handle college coursework in the subject.
There were some other encouraging results in Wednesday’s report.
State Superintendent of Public Instruction Sydnee Dickson congratulated students and teachers for maintaining their ACT scores, even as grades went down nationally. In 2015, the year the most recent results come from, 658 students took the exam.
The amount of students who graduated high school in 2016 and took the ACT reached an all-time high at almost 2.1 million – close to two-thirds of the country’s students.
“This year’s ACT-tested class is more representative of the student population than any we’ve ever had”, ACT Chief Executive Officer Marten Roorda said in a statement.
Further analysis of the data also shows a disproportionate number of under-represented students did not take advantage of fee waivers that 12th graders can use to retake the test to improve their scores, a number Cassellius indicated she would like to see increase in future years.
In 2016, only one-fifth of Tennessee public school students taking the ACT met all four subject benchmarks for being considered college-ready. That’s down from 12.8 percent in 2015. Still, that resulted in an additional 1,369 students meeting all four benchmarks and being identified as college ready over 2015’s numbers. Thirty-one percent of 2015 graduates didn’t meet any of the benchmarks.
For comparison, the average composite score for students in the Blue Valley School District this year was 25.9.
While Nevada has an often transient student body with a significant percentage of students in poverty and learning English, “that can not be an excuse that lets us gain comfort in our 17-point average”, he said.
Statewide, the biggest drop in performance came in English, where only 44 percent of SC students met the benchmark, down from 61 percent in 2015. A larger number of juniors also took the test this past spring, when the district was only required to offer the opportunity to take it.
Because previous scores were reported mainly from college-bound students, more of them were seniors, and many of them had participated in advanced classes that the non-college-bound students had not taken.
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In English, reading and science, Georgia students outperformed the national averages, and Georgia scored the same as the national average in mathematics. In 2012, 33,541 students were tested.
