The Tennessee Department of Education says that 76.1 percent of the state’s public high school class of 2019 participated in the department’s third ACT Senior Retake opportunity in October 2018 It was the state’s highest participation rate on record. Of those seniors who retook the ACT in 2018, more than 50 percent increased their composite score from their junior year score, a 10.2 percent point increase from 2017. Also, the average ACT composite score increased by 0.5 points for students who took the ACT during their junior year and through the ACT Senior Retake in 2018.
Additionally, 3,825 seniors raised their composite score to a 21 or higher, allowing them to access more than $61 million in HOPE Scholarship funds that provide each student up to $16,000 to help pay for college in Tennessee. This number is up from 2,333 students in 2017.
The 2018 ACT retake also resulted in more students hitting the ACT college-readiness benchmarks across-the-board in each of the four tested subject areas: math, English, science, and reading.