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Comment by keenmaster | Hacker News Reader

Mississippi's average ACT scores are tied for last (edit: tied for second to last). I’m sure some of their educational outcomes are improving, but the demographic-adjusted stats from elementary school students are misleading. Holding kids back for poor performance can really pump their numbers inadvertently. Even if that’s not a very prevalent practice, performance in high school is more important and far more predictive of life outcomes.

You know what’s crazier? Mississippi’s average ACT was higher before some of their education policy improvements.

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ACT scores trail education outcomes by ~10 years, as students in school in the middle of a shift don’t get the full benefit from it - they’re often not included in policy changes for the sake of continuity (you may not be able to suddenly change the way you teach math in 5th grade).

The main changes to reading instruction were made around 2013, and math instruction in 2016. I wouldn’t expect a decrease in ACT scores 12 and 9 years later respectively, even when considering that it takes some time for instructors to master the new approach.

State-based ACT scores are also highly influenced by who takes the ACT. If more students choose to take the ACT, the scores might go down even it's because your education system is doing a better job because more kids are trying for college.

For the same reason, you'll see some surprising state scores for SAT/ACT. If you're in a state that prioritizes the ACT, the main students taking the SAT are the strongest students who are looking at out-of-state schools.

Aside from the time lag, I don't think you can look at voluntary test scores and draw many useful conclusions from it.

https://www.act.org/content/act/en/products-and-services/the...

Indeed they are towards the bottom, but not "tied for last".

Talking about statistics, take a look at the "Estimated % of Grads Tested" column. the top 20 do not break 20%, while the bottom is near 100% with the exception of Hawa'ii.

Thanks for pointing that out, they’re actually tied for second-to-last.

As for % tested, states that don’t mandate the ACT tend to have higher performance in general. They don’t have as compelling of a need for the mandate, and they have many students who’d rather just take the SAT on its own. There is an effect going the other way though - if you don’t mandate the ACT, then students who don’t want to take any standardised testing at all…won’t, and so they won’t depress the average score.

It's the height of elitism to pretend that this comment isn't shooting up in the rankings, and it would be foolish to ignore it

> By the way, if you control for HN comments made by me on 5/7/25, this is the #1 ranked comment.

I have nothing to add. I just wanted to show that I helped contribute to make keenmaster's 5/7/25 comment on this thread his #1 comment on this thread for the day, 5/7/25. Hello to all of the future historians looking back on this moment!

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