Test scores are not irrelevant

Dynomight

Surprised by this claim, I read the paper. I don’t want to be indelicate, but… the paper doesn’t give the slightest shred of evidence that the above claim is true. It’s not that the paper is wrong, exactly, it simply doesn’t address how useful ACT scores are for college admissions.

So why do we have all these articles that seem to make this claim, you ask? That’s an interesting question! But first, let’s see what’s actually in the paper.

Test scores are not irrelevant

The authors got data for 55,084 students who graduated from Chicago public schools between 2006 and 2009. Most of their analysis only looks at a subset of 17,753 who enrolled in a 4-year college immediately after high school. Here’s the percentage of those who graduated college within 6 years for each possible GPA and ACT score: