<p>[2012</a> ACT National and State Scores | Average Scores by State | ACT](<a href=“http://www.act.org/newsroom/data/2012/states.html]2012”>http://www.act.org/newsroom/data/2012/states.html)</p>
<p>avg scores are around 20 ???
you’re kidding me…</p>
<p>That’s depressing. The public school system in this country needs a serious reworking. Test scores have been slumping here for a long time, and the US is really falling behind the rest of the world.</p>
<p>Well, hey, not everyone can get a 30+.</p>
<p>The score is also a composite score, meaning it’s averaged between sections (unlike how the SAT adds scores). Therefore, someone could have done average on most sections and tanked the last one (darn you, science) to drag down their entire score.</p>
<p>It’s also important to realize that there are some people who just aren’t good students who try to take the ACT and, quite frankly, fall flat on their faces.</p>
<p>But hey, don’t sweat it. If you have time to fret about it, then you should go study instead of worrying about how others did.</p>
<p>This is very serious. I taught at a school were 99% of students scored below a 21 composite.</p>
<p>One time, a student scored a 24 on a practice test, and everybody – including administration – was super impressed. That same semester, I talked to a substitute teacher, who was proud to admit that he scored a 19 when he took the ACT.</p>
<p>It all depends on your perspective.</p>
<p>This is a growing problem in America. One must realize that these students are the future generation in our country. Many of them may not attend college. Regardless of where the problem lies, the issue is a serious one that is increasing at an increasing rate. Many efforts have sprung up over the past few years as an effort to reverse some of that momenta, and education is an extremely important issue into which our politicians, both on the local and federal levels, must continue to invest their resources. Please keep that in mind as we work together to bring America’s education system back to the top.</p>
<p>I thought ACT scores are always normalized with mean 21 and standard deviation around 5…if that’s the case, claiming that the average score is 20 or 21 means nothing. However if you look at the average raw scores, or the “college-readiness benchmark” that the ACT uses, that says something about how bad our education is as a whole.</p>