I taught at a school in Orleans Parish where only 3 students made above a 15 on the pre ACT. I know it is hard to believe, but it does not matter who the teachers are in that school, the scores would be about the same. Everyone blames the teachers, when the students don't come, don't bring materials, and don't participate in the education process while they are there.
For some we'd have to put it in this kind of context for them to be interested: Maybe then they'd learn how many continents there are. :grin:
i know this sounds like a cop-out but some kids don't test well. i have known kids that were very smart and participated in their educational process. but put a test in front of em and everything they knew left their head.
That is true but we're not talking a few, we're talking about widespread failure of the Public Schools due to a series of inicators, namely parenting and poor teaching. For example, 35-40% scoring Unsatisfactory and Approaching Basic in Math and English in Louisiana on the 4th grade LEAP tests and 46-47% in the 8th grade LEAP (Math & English)......not looking good down the road for them, especially when you know that Approaching Basic is 60% and all they're required to move on. :dis: http://www.louisianaschools.net/lde/saa/1560.asp
Have the grading standards changed on the ACT? Or is it just more competitive now? At the high school my siblings and I went to (which was a good one back then) in the late 70s and 80s several people I know who graduated in the top 20 of their class scored on average 18/19 on the ACT. Now, the top 1 or 2 people would score above 30 (a few even got perfect scores), and the remaining people in the top 5 might score in the upper 20s. You might have a few people who weren't ranked that high in the class who would get high scores (people who were very smart, but liked to goof off in class). My siblings and I each scored in the low to mid 20s, we were ranked fairly high in our class though not in the top five. I guess what I want to say is that in our experience a high teens score was considered average, a score above 20 was considered very good, a score in the high 20s was considered great, and a score above 30 was something only the really brilliant achieved (like the valedictorian from my sister's class that graduated from LSU in three years and was the top student there as well). I guess if we were high school students now, we'd just prepare more for the test if necessary. Back then it was open admissions, so there really wasn't any pressure to score anything specific...all of us just took the test with no prep whatsoever. I think our only concern was scoring high enough that we wouldn't need to take any remedial courses.
I'd just say the higher scores now are a result of a change in curriculum. Schools prepare the students to get better scores through repetition, etc. I know in Florida they specifically engineer the curriculum to passing the FLEAPs, since funding is based on the percentage of students who pass. The intelligence of students is probably just the same. I do like that LSU is raising the ACT standards.
I think that is your answer. The only kids who really worked hard to study for the tests were those very few who were trying to get academic scholarships. We never took practice tests as high school juniors. Hell, almost nobody ever thought about taking it again. There were no courses to prep students to take the ACT, especially CD-based and online prep tools. The average college-bound student didn't need grades or test scores to get enrolled. State colleges had open admissions, all you needed to enroll was a diploma. There is more pressure now to score high on the tests just to get enrolled. There are no more remedial classes at LSU. If you can't hack English 1001, then it's no soup for you. Business is booming at BRCC as a result. This morning's news is that even Grambling is now abandoning open admissions and will have some grade and test requirements to meet next fall. Sally Clausen stated that the freshmen enrolled Grambling with less than a 2.0 in high school had a 97% failure rate and it was evidence that too many Grambling students had no business in college. Grambling's enrollment will continue to drop and it will become increasingly wasteful to operate such a small university that is only a few miles away from Louisiana Tech. I expect a merger to be proposed within 10 years.
Here's a good read on what you are referring to- far from a cop-out. :thumb: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070219/od_nm/math_anxiety_dc
As of the 1999-2000 academic year, there certainly existed MATH 0092, which is essentially remedial high school trigonometry. I can see from the current course offerings that it is no longer offered, which is definitely a good thing (TM).
