According to the NY Times, the ACT people say that fewer than a quarter of the students finishing high school who took their test are prepared for college in the four areas they test: reading comprehension, math, English, and science.
Only about half of this year's high school graduates have the reading skills they need to succeed in college, and even fewer are prepared for college-level science and math courses, according to a yearly report from ACT, which produces one of the nation's leading college admissions tests.
The report, based on scores of the 2005 high school graduates who took the exam, some 1.2 million students in all, also found that fewer than one in four met the college-readiness benchmarks in all four subjects tested: reading comprehension, English, math and science.
I do not think too much should be read into this. A lot of high school graduates look for a more useful way to spend their time than college, and there is a good deal of substitutability between skills. I remember as an undergraduate at Chicago the English majors who could barely add, and vividly remember the barely literate physics whiz.
It seems to me, though, that there is an important way in which entering college students are unprepared, which is at best only indirectly picked up by tests such as the ACT and the SAT. In some ways, new college students know that it is different from high school, especially if they live away from their parents, because they have more freedom. They certainly pick up quickly that attendance is rarely mandatory. What they are often slow to pick up, however, is that expectations are higher in important ways. In high school, if you are failing a class, your parents get contacted, and everyone gets all worried. In college, you just fail. Unless you are in a very small class, no one is likely to do anything. There is a shift in responsibility to the student. It does not mean that no one in a university cares if you fail. It means that the burden is on the student to do something about it. A while back, my wife was working on a project with a woman whose son was taking a class from me, and failing. (I will not say at which university I was teaching at the time.) While we were running errands one day, my wife wanted to drop off something at this woman's house, and I waited outside in the car for her. By coincidence, the failing son came home just then and saw me in the car. He went inside in a panic because he thought I had come to see his parents about his performance in class. He simply did not comprehend that it was up to him to take the initiative to do something about his failing. An important cause of students getting into academic difficulties is students who are not prepared for the responsibilities created by the relative freedom of university life.
None of this, by the way, is intended to let teachers off the hook. If it is the responsibility students to deal with not comprehending the subject, it is also the responsibility of the teacher to ensure that students know they are doing badly. One of my concerns with the Irish university system when I came here in 1992 was an absence of regular assessment, although that has improved substantially since then.
