A majority of high school graduates aspire to earn a college degree (ACT, 2016), yet many students are graduating from high school unprepared to do college-level work. As a result, about one-third of college freshmen enroll in at least one developmental course upon entry to college (Skomsvold, 2014). Because developmental courses are often not…

The ACT College Readiness Benchmarks are the ACT scores associated with a 50% chance of earning a B or higher grade in selected first-year credit-bearing courses at a typical postsecondary institution. The Benchmarks were established by linking ACT test scores with grades in first-year college courses from the same subject area. Benchmarks were…

Although about 40% of high school graduates who take the ACT® test express interest in pursuing a career in a science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) field, the percentage of first-year students in college who declare a STEM major is substantially lower. The pool of prospective STEM workers shrinks further as the majority of STEM…

This article examines the logic underlying different models for assessing the college readiness of high school students. It focuses on benchmark scores that purportedly identify students who are college ready and presents the challenges of using threshold scores from a single assessment instrument to represent readiness. As well as providing…

In this report, we establish benchmarks of readiness for four common first-year college courses: English Composition, College Algebra, Social Science, and Biology. Using grade data from a large sample of colleges, we modeled the probability of success in these courses as a function of ACT test scores. Success was defined as a course grade of B or…