Why Are Standardized Test Scores Going Down?

According to a recent report of 2023's high school seniors, the average Composite ACT score has gone down for the sixth year in a row, this time by a total difference of .3. It doesn't look like a whole lot, and maybe in isolation it wouldn't be. Unfortunately, this drop in ACT scores is part of a trend that's been going on for years for multiple different standardized tests. But how bad is it? What does it mean? Why is it happening? And what can we do to fix it?

What are the average standardized test scores this year?

The most recent data shows an average ACT Composite score of 19.5, which is down by .3 from last year. As for the SATs, the average math score this year was 508 and the average reading score was 520, both down considerably from last year's averages and the pre-pandemic peaks of 2018 and 2019.

What is a good standardized test score?

As with everything in this process, a good score is going to depend quite a bit on your goals and expectations. If you're planning on attending an affordable school with a high acceptance rate, a score hovering around the average should be just fine. If you're aiming for an Ivy League school like Harvard, Yale, or Princeton, you should aim to be on the very high end of the scoreboard.

While what counts as a good score will depend heavily on your particular goals, higher is basically always helpful. Even if the school you're going to has a very high acceptance rate, a strong performance on a standardized test could go a long way in netting you some scholarship money. That said, many schools have gone test-optional or even test-blind (meaning they reject any submitted test scores), so it's not even necessarily true that higher means better. Always make sure to check the test policy of all the school's you're looking at. And not to brag or anything, but College Rover has a handy little button to check that info for any college you want.

Are Standardized Test Scores Going Down?

The ACT and the SAT have been experiencing different versions of the same trend in average scores, which is generally heading downward. Both tests reached peaks in their average scores a while ago-with the SATs hitting theirs in 2018 and the ACTs reaching theirs all the way back in 2007 but maintaining roughly that same peak for a decade-and have declined since then.

The decline in average scores for the SATs doesn't seem to be cause for much concern. In 2023, the average Math score is 508 and the average Reading score is 520, which is nearly exactly the same with 2005 averages and stronger than many other years, including as recently as 2016. The trend downward starts from two record setting peaks in 2017 and 2018 and falls dramatically from there. There are broader trends downward over the decades that the test has existed as well as broader trends upward, but the point is that the current nadir in strong SAT scores seems to be not as critical an issue as it might first appear.

The ACTs, on the other hand, prove a bit more worrying. According to this resource compiling data from almost three decades of ACT scores, 2023 is the lowest average score ever in the history of the test. And unlike the SAT (possibly because the scoring system uses a much smaller number), the average Composite ACT scores of each year have held relatively steady until now. From 1992 to 2017, the lowest average Composite score was 20.7 and the highest was 21.2, a difference of only .5. But from 2017 to 2023, the average fell from 21.0 to 19.5, a bigger difference in just 6 years than has occurred in the entire history of the test prior to 2017. 

While the SATs have shown a noticeable drop-off, it doesn't seem like too much to worry about, at least not yet. The ACT decline, however, is much more noticeable and troubling.

Why Is This Happening?

There's no immediately obvious explanation, but there are a few possibilities.

What's Causing the Decline in SAT Scores?

We're starting with the SAT because it might prove unique here. The peak scores were in 2017 and 2018, with the average scores from both years completely obliterating the scores from the previous years. We're talking a seismic leap, especially in the reading section which saw an almost 40 point jump from 2016 to 2017, beating even the previous record-high set all the way back in 1972. In 2018, SAT takers did even better than the previous year. Only after that did a decline start to become noticeable.

So what gives? Why were students excelling at unprecedented levels in 2017 and 2018? Well, one potential explanation is that the SAT removed the writing portion of the test in 2017, making 2016 the last year that students had to prep for three sections instead of only two.

This is all speculation based on a little statistical correlation, but it could be that students had over-prepared for the test in 2017 and 2018 because they had been anticipating a larger test than they received. By the time they sat down to take the SAT, the smaller test meant they weren't as stressed and probably took the sections more seriously. It also meant that any kind of SAT prep course could devote all of its time and attention to just two sections instead of three, theoretically better preparing students for those sections than they previously would have.

Why it would then drop off after this back to around previous averages is anybody's guess, but it's worth noting that average Reading scores are still higher than almost any year prior to 2017. And while Math scores could stand to be higher, they're nowhere close to record lows of the 70s and 80s. This is all to say that the SATs seem to be in good shape, and students looking to take the SATs should study hard for the Math section, which has proven more challenging for many students.

Why Are ACT Scores Going Down?

This question is a bit trickier than the SAT. The ACTs aren't just seeing a momentary dip but rather a sustained and record-breaking decline in average scores not seen in the entire test's history, which has seen a consistent, slightly fluctuating average hovering around 21. Now, however, the test has bottomed out at 19.3, and it could get even lower than that. So what gives?

The Pandemic

As noted in this article, the high school seniors of 2023 were first-years when the pandemic started. The significance of this should be obvious: their first year in high school was completely disrupted by a global catastrophe and their classroom experience was replaced with a very experimental and uncertain attempt at online classes. The entire rest of their high school experience was defined either by purely online classes (which teachers were still figuring out how to effectively manage) or in-person classes that could, at any moment, be disrupted and temporarily turned into online classes again. 

With this in mind, it's almost absurd to expect that the students whose high school experience was so marred by dysfunction would do as well on the ACT as their peers from previous years. The schooling they received was, through no fault of their own, not as strong. Fewer close interaction with teachers, less of accountability, great environmental and pedagogical inconsistency, and the lack of a shared and dedicated learning environment all mean that the classes these students took were, in all likelihood, not as effective as the consistent, in-person classes experienced by most everyone else.

Not only that, the trauma and social dysfunction of experiencing the pandemic. How many people developed severe depression and anxiety during the pandemic that affected their ability to learn and study? How many people got Covid during crucial moments in the academic year that caused them to continue struggling? 

The pandemic undoubtedly had a negative impact on students' performance on the ACTs, but it doesn't quite explain why the decline has been occurring since before the pandemic. After all, 2019 and 2018 also featured record-lows, and those were pre-pandemic. The problem likely goes deeper.

Criticism of Standardized Testing

For a long time but in recent years in particular, standardized tests have been heavily criticized as unfair for a variety of reasons. Consequently, many colleges and universities have responded to these criticisms of standardized tests by making their admissions test-optional or even test-blind, evidently feeling that standardized tests simply weren't accurate measures of students' abilities.

At this point, a huge number of schools (including many Ivy Leagues) have gone test optional, and when that's the case, it's not hard to imagine that students might take standardized tests less seriously both in preparedness and performance. Students who don't see themselves sending in a standardized test in their college applications will see little reason to stress about the tests and may only take them on the off chance that they get a good score. And given that test-taking is a skill in and of itself, students who don't envision the test mattering in their admissions might not take the time to perfect their ACT-taking skills and would rather spend their time studying for tests and writing papers for their classes.

The ACT College Readiness Benchmarks are claimed to be a set of minimum ACT test-scores required for students "to have a high probability of success in credit-bearing first-year college courses," and apparently this year, the average scores for every subject were below the benchmarks. The problem? While these benchmarks are backed up by research, they hinge on the idea that the ACT is an accurate reflection of students' abilities, but that isn't necessarily the case. For example, students who don't take the test seriously or don't prepare for its specificities might fail to meet those benchmarks even though they would be successful in the college setting. 

The bottom line is that criticism of standardized testing as unfair and inaccurate as well as the new test-optional environment of college admissions means that students probably don't feel as much pressure to succeed on the ACT. Students with good grades and a strong essay might just as well sandbag the test when they take it because they know it won't be of any consequence.

Other Reasons

This isn't an exhaustive list of the possibilities by any means. It could very well be that high schools simply aren't preparing their students for standardized tests enough. It could also be a change in the types of questions found on the ACT. For all we know, it could be the sudden and widespread popularity of TikTok! 

Everyone is going to have an opinion on this, but no one knows exactly what it could be. And realistically, all of these things are probably contributing to the issue, but with colleges going test-optional en masse, it might not even be right to call it an issue.

How College Rover Can Help

College Rover has compiled tons of data from the Department of Education and oodles of resources from across the internet to help make this whole process easier, and that includes standardized tests. For starters, make it easy to find out if the colleges you like are test-optional (hint: they probably are), so you can decide if it's even worth it. If it looks like a good idea for you to take the ACT or SAT, we've got more than a few resources to help you prep for whatever you need to do.