ACT administrators set benchmark scores every year that represent the academic level students need to reach to succeed in college.
For example, the reading benchmark is a score of 22 on the reading portion of the ACT.
According to the ACT website , act.org , students who achieve that score are expected to have a 50 percent chance of earning a B or higher and a 75 percent chance of earning a C or higher in corresponding first-year college classes.
In Indiana, 70 percent of ACT-tested high school grads met the English college readiness benchmark, compared to 64 percent of ACT-tested high schoolers nationally.
According to an ACT press release , there’s an even wider gap between the proportion of Indiana students and U.S. students overall meeting the math benchmark — about 52 percent of Indiana students passed while only 43 percent of students passed nationwide.
The ACT tests college readiness in English, reading, math and science.
About 32 percent of Indiana students met benchmarks in all four subjects on the ACT, compared to 26 percent of students nationally.
Nationally, about 57 percent of the high school graduating class took the ACT this year.
That includes only about 40 percent of students in Indiana, according to an ACT press release.
ACT testers also found that students who take the recommended curriculum of four years of English and three years each of math, social studies and science are more likely to be college-ready by ACT standards than students that do not.
Nationally, 73 percent of students taking core curriculum met the benchmark score on the English portion of the ACT, compared to 47 percent of students who did not take the full core curriculum.
Only 8 percent of students not taking the core curriculum met the math benchmark, compared to 54 percent of those taking the recommended three years of math courses.
The ACT organization states in the release that getting more high school students to take the core curriculum, among other factors, could improve the college readiness of students nation wide.
