ACT Test Results Show Few Blacks Ready for College-Level Coursework

In analyzing the ACT test scores of 2006 black high school seniors, the American College Testing Program concludes that only 3 percent of all black students are sufficiently prepared to deal with college-level coursework in all four disciplines of English, mathematics, social science, and biology. For whites, the results showed that 26 percent of high school seniors who took the ACT test were academically prepared to handle the college curriculum in these subject areas.

When broken down into particular subjects, ACT found that 38 percent of all black students were prepared for college-level work in English. More than 20 percent of all black students were ready for college work in the social sciences. But the results showed that only 11 percent of black students were prepared for college-level mathematics and only 5 percent were ready to study biology at the college level.

Copyright © 2006. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. All rights reserved.