Perry County Central High School ACT incident angers parents

WYMT-TV reports that parents of students at the Perry County Central High School are upset that their children are being required to take the ACT college entrance test again.

As we previously noted there appear to have been irregularities in the way the high school administered the ACT in 2009 and 2010 and the PLAN test for 10th graders in 2009.

Parents – and even the district superintendent – are upset because very little information has been provided from the ACT, Incorporated outside of the announcement that the scores for tests taken in the high school in 2009 and 2010 were being cancelled.

There are rumors that students who tested in Perry Central High School and then transferred to other schools in Kentucky had some implausibly high scores. Possibly, reports from those other schools may have triggered the ACT action.

And, as I mentioned in the previous blog, I took a look on my own at the change in Perry County Central High’s 11th grade ACT scores for 2008 and 2009. There was an unusually high one-year increase in the ACT Composite Score average between those two years.

ACT is being very tight-lipped about the situation, but it may be that the testing organization is reserving judgment until it looks at the results from retesting the students.

Once that data is in hand, perhaps we will hear more from ACT.

In the mean time, parents certainly are right to be upset, but when the dust settles on this, they may need to look close to home to find the people responsible for their kids having to take the ACT again. And, it may turn out that some of the scores their kids got the first time were inflated by inappropriate testing procedures.

Stay tuned.