Fair is fair

Strive Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky is an effort to improve education, and they have been doing some interesting things.

Still, fair is fair, and Strive put up this post which is very easily misinterpreted. It shows the percentages of Ohio and Kentucky ACT college entrance test takers who met ACT college readiness Benchmark Scores by intended majors such as management, education and health care.

The problem is that the data is for 2009 high school graduates, and while Kentucky tested 100% of our grads with the ACT, in Ohio only 64% took this college entrance test. Thus, Strive’s showing of two graphs right above and below each other invites highly inappropriate comparisons.

In fact, Strive really needs to explain that a rather small proportion of the Ohio graduates took the ACT just to provide necessary data to interpret the Ohio graph by itself.

Anyway, while Ohio used to outscore us on the ACT, fair comparisons are not nearly as easy to do today as the Strive blog item implies.

The Bluegrass Institute strongly favors 100% ACT testing, by the way. Ohio really ought to try it.