Douglas ACT scores better than most

Test scores have once again become a political issue with fliers mailed to Douglas voters in support of the re-election of Doug Englekirk and election of Antoinette Casselberry.

Englekirk is facing challenger Erinn Miller and Melinda Gneiting and Casselberry are vying for the Gardnerville Ranchos seat being vacated by Linda Gilkerson. Early in-person voting begins on Saturday.

In Nevada, juniors are required to take the ACT, but not required to excel or even pass it in order to receive a diploma.

That lack of repercussions has not always been the case for proficiency testing in the Silver State.

In 1959, The Record-Courier announced that the Selective Service College Qualifications Test would be given to college men on April 30.

“Scores made on the test are used by local boards as one guide in considering requests for deferment from military service to continue studies,” according to the March 12, 1959, edition.

Sixty-five years ago, if you didn’t pass a proficiency test men were eligible for the draft, and while 1959 was pretty quiet, the Vietnam War was right around the corner.

Nevada started requiring high school seniors to pass a proficiency test in 1982, when The R-C reported 17 students failed the three required proficiency tests, which was about 6 percent of the senior class in Douglas County

People wrote letters to the editor and protested to the school board because their students couldn’t earn a diploma without passing the test, and if they couldn’t pass the test, they couldn’t graduate.

In August 2013, five of eight seniors who couldn’t pass the proficiency test were able to improve through summer school to the point where they received diplomas.

That was the same year the Nevada Legislature mandated that all Nevada high schools administer a college readiness test to all juniors.

The following year the State Board of Education approved a plan to have all juniors take a free ACT exam to qualify for a diploma.

“A student’s ACT score will not be used to determine graduation eligibility, but can be submitted with college applications,” according to the Nevada Department of Education’s web site.

In 2015, the state of Nevada paid $6.1 million so every junior in the state could take the ACT. The Record-Courier opined in June 2016 that would result in students recognizing that unless they were going to college, there wasn’t much point in trying very hard on the test, since they didn’t have to excel or even pass to graduate.

The following spring saw Douglas students achieve a 91.9 percent passing rate in language arts and a 69.3 percent in math. Those were the highest scores achieved in the last eight years.

Statewide language scores on the ACT dropped 17.4 percent and math scores dropped 29.3 percent. Douglas students dropped 31.9 percent to a score of 61 on the language test and 24.3 percent reduction in math scores to 45 percent.

Then the coronavirus outbreak hit, and no tests were given in spring 2020. On the other side of the pandemic, Douglas language scores dropped to 51.9 percent and math was 26.8 percent in 2021.

According to scores released in September, Douglas was at 46.1 percent in language and 25.3 percent in math.

While not good by any means, those are higher than the statewide scores and those listed by the state for school districts in Carson, Lyon, Washoe, Churchill, Mineral, Elko, Humboldt, Lincoln, Nye, Pershing and White Pine counties.

Statewide, only Storey and Eureka counties scored higher than Douglas in both language and math, according to an analysis of results on nevadareportcard.nv.gov conducted by The Record-Courier.

Meanwhile, ACT scores nationwide have been dropping for the last six years and the nonprofit that conducts the tests is changing, too.

Starting in spring 2025, tests will drop from three hours to two with shorter reading passages and 44 fewer questions, according to the nonprofit’s chief executive officer.