More on the grading issues in Kentucky’s schools

I blogged several days about “Which Kentucky school districts grade too hard or too easy?”

http://www.bipps.org/kentucky-school-districts-grade-hard-easy/

discussing evidence in the 2018 High School Feedback Workbook

https://kystats.ky.gov/Content/Reports/PublicAccessDataFiles/2018HighSchoolFeedbackWorkbookDataFile.csv

assembled by the Kentucky Center for Statistics

https://kystats.ky.gov/

that indicates grading standards across Kentucky’s school districts are very uneven. My analysis looked at how each district’s average ACT Composite Score compared to the Grade Point Average (GPA) for the graduating class of 2015-16.

Today, I discuss another analysis based on the Workbook data. I took a look at how well the Kentucky High School Class of 2016’s ACT performance in each district correlated to those students’ first year college GPAs. I also looked at the correlation between each district’s high school GPAs for that graduating class and the first year college GPAs those students earned.

I was curious to see if something we often hear – that high school GPAs are more closely related to college GPAs than the ACT – was shown by this data.

Quite simply, that often-heard claim isn’t supported by the Kentucky Center for Statistics data for the Kentucky High School Class of 2016.

The correlation between the ACT and college GPA was 0.44 and the correlation between the high school GPA and college GPA was very slightly lower at 0.41.

I need to stress that there are some important caveats to this simple analysis. Not all students in each district go on to college, so there is some “apples to oranges” here. If the Kentucky Center for Statistics were to do a student-by-student tracking only for those students who go on from high school to college, the results might look different.

Still, the best data currently available to the public indicates that in Kentucky – thanks to what our previous blog shows is uneven grading standards across the state’s public school systems – the common claim that ACT isn’t as good a predictor of college performance as the high school GPA just might not be true.

You can see my spreadsheet with the correlation calculations by clicking here.