High school grade inflation accelerated during the pandemic, according to ACT. “The findings echo a recent federal study that also showed signs of grade inflation,” writes Sarah D. Sparks in Education Week. The average GPA (grade point average) has been rising since 2010, reports Edgar Sanchez, a senior research scientist at ACT. Test scores have not. The gap began increasing significantly in 2018, before the pandemic. Grades rose faster for girls and for Black students, ACT

Only five percent of high school students who took the ACT in 2017 plan to major in education, according to a new ACT report. That makes education the eighth most popular prospective major, behind health sciences (23 percent), business (10 percent), engineering (9 percent), social sciences (9 percent), science (8 percent), arts (7 percent) and undecided. Alarmingly, interest in majoring in education correlates, negatively, with college readiness. ACT reports that 73 percent o

The ability to write cogently, quickly and under pressure, helped me get into and through college. However, a growing list of selective universities have stopped requiring applicants to take SAT and ACT essay tests, reports  Nick Anderson in the Washington Post. Brown, Princeton and Stanford dropped the requirement this month, following Dartmouth, Harvard and Yale. The University of Michigan followed suit yesterday. The essay test unfairly burdens low-income students, who oft

At colleges that don’t require applicants to submit SAT or ACT scores, students admitted on grades alone are just as likely to graduate as those who submit test scores, according to a new study, Defining Access: How Test-Optional Works. Credit: LA Johnson/NPR In addition, researchers found that test-optional colleges “enroll — and graduate — a higher proportion of low-income and first generation-students, and more students from diverse backgrounds,” reports NPR’s Claudio Sanc

Test scores matter, writes Erika Sanzi on Good School Hunting. In deciding where to build its second headquarters (HQ2), Amazon is considering average SAT and ACT scores of potential sites, reports the Wall Street Journal. The company wants a strong local talent pool and to persuade employees to move to the city, writes Sanzi. “No parent, or future parent, wants to be transferred to a place with lousy schools and one objective and comparable measure of school quality can be f

California may let schools replace 11th-grade Smarter Balanced tests with the SAT or ACT, reports CALmatters’ Felicia Mello. That might encourage college-going, but erode accountability for the state’s high schools. More than 30 California districts offer a college admission test for free during the school day, to encourage students to apply to college. Some offer test-prep help as well. But they’re also required to give 11th graders the Common Core-aligned Smarter Balanced t

States vow to graduate students who are college- and career-ready but have no idea if they’re succeeding, writes Checker Finn. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) should test 12th-graders’ academic skills. In addition to reading, writing and math, “how great it would be also to report 12th-grade state results in other core subjects, particularly science and history!” Requiring high school to take the SAT or ACT, instead of standardized state tests, would en

Test-optional college admissions tilts the playing field just a little bit more, writes Kelly Ochs Rosinger, a Penn education professor, on The Conversation. More than 1,000 colleges no longer require applicants to submit an SAT or ACT score. “Instead of expanding economic and racial diversity at American colleges, test-optional policies have actually served to make selective colleges even more selective,” she writes, citing an analysis of 180 liberal arts colleges, including

To get more smart, disadvantaged students into better colleges, all students should take the SAT or ACT free of charge, argues Susan Dynarski.Susan Dynarski is a professor of education, public policy and economics at the University of Michigan. “Even for students who perform well in high school, parents’ income strongly predicts whether they will attend and complete college,” she writes. We’re losing talent, because children of non-college-educated parents are getting lost in

Huge achievement gaps separate advantaged and disadvantaged students, according to ACT’s annual The Condition of College & Career Readiness 2017 report. “Scores from the ACT show that just 9 percent of students in the class of 2017 who came from low-income families, whose parents did not go to college, and who identify as black, Hispanic, American Indian or Pacific Islander are strongly ready for college,” reports Nick Anderson in the Washington Post. By contrast, 54 percent