1. How different are college graduation rates (six years after initial enrollment) for students with the same HSGPAs/ACT scores who come from different high schools?
2. Do ACT scores provide a stronger, or more consistent, prediction of college readiness across high schools than HSGPAs?
3. Is there less high school variance in college graduation rates in models that use students’ ACT scores and HSGPAs together, than models that use HSGPAs alone?
4. To what extent are high school differences in college graduation rates for students with the same HSGPAs and ACT scores explained by school characteristics?
5. How large and consistent are the relationships of ACT scores and HSGPAs with enrollment in a four-year college and with graduation rates after four years?
High school GPAs (HSGPAs) are often perceived to represent inconsistent levels of readiness for college across high schools, whereas test scores (e.g., ACT scores) are seen as comparable. This study tests those assumptions, examining variation across high schools of both HSGPAs and ACT scores as measures of academic readiness for college. We found students with the same HSGPA or the same ACT score graduate at very different rates based on which high school they attended. Yet, the relationship of HSGPAs with college graduation is strong and consistent and larger than school effects. In contrast, the relationship of ACT scores with college graduation is weak and smaller than high school effects, and the slope of the relationship varies by high school.
Key Findings
"...there is little evidence that students will have more college success if they work to improve their ACT score because most of the signal from the ACT score seems to represent factors associated with the student’s school rather than the student.
In contrast, students’ efforts to improve their HSGPAs would seem to have considerable potential leverage for improving college readiness.
The fact that HSGPAs are based on so many different criteria—including effort over an entire semester in many different types of classes, demonstration of skills through multiple formats, and different teacher expectations—does not seem to be a weakness.
Instead, it might help to make HSGPAs strong indicators of readiness because they measure a very wide variety of the skills and behaviors that are needed for success in college, where students will also encounter widely varying content and expectations."
The final, definitive version of this article has been published in Educational Researcher, 49(3), 198-211 by SAGE Publications Ltd./SAGE Publications, Inc., All rights reserved. © 2020
Click below to view at podcast from the Lumina Foundation, featuring report author Elaine Allensworth (January 21, 2020)