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Originally Posted by Talks Too Much
In some US high schools, all students (even those not planning on attending college) are forced to take the test, and how motivated do you think they are to do well? They probably skew the numbers a bit.
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Michigan public school students are required to take the ACT as part of our state standardized testing (MME). Based on my personal experience with my classmates, probably about 1/4 of my classmates took the test seriously (most of them utilizing study aids or taking classes), and the remaining 3/4 couldn't care less. I would bet that the 1/4 who cared scored far higher than those who didn't. I think that part of the problem is that many students don't see reason to score well: it could be that standards are not set in the home, they don't plan on attending college, there aren't social pressures to conform to, they simply don't care about their future yet, etc. If we found ways to improve motivation from a younger age, I'm sure that general education (NOT just test scores) would improve as a whole. Personally, I think that a more applied, personal education (showing students WHY they should know the material that they're being taught, and giving some real-life examples) is one of the solutions.
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Originally Posted by sanddrag
First way to fixing education is smaller class sizes. I don't think anyone disagrees with that.
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I couldn't agree more. I felt that the learning environment was far better in my 20-student Humanities class than in my 29-student Pre-calculus class. Unfortunately, as school budgets shrink, the size of mandatory couses only grows.
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Originally Posted by davidthefat
May be I am just stuck in a bubble of education right now, I consider any ACT score under 30 and SAT score under 2000 as "bad". Now it may shock you that the national averages are significantly lower than I have even heard of anyone getting.
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One of my friends initially scored an 18 on his ACT. Another one of my friends scored a 36. I scored a 29. Like a lot of universities, I consider a 23 to 25 to be a good, average score. My high school's averages were very close to the national ones, and our district prides itself on being consistently ranked one of the top in the nation (which I have issues with, but that's not a rant for here). Back to the friends above...they going to a respectable state university as a music major and to Harvard, respectively. What scores are considered "normal" or "good" to a person depends on the social norms in their area, as shown by the differences in our views.
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All that being said, I am of the opinion that the ACT is a horrible way of determining a person's education/intelligence, and should only be used for that purpose when other indicators are also being looked at (such as GPA, social concerns, and district-wide numbers).