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Providence High tops ranking of Charlotte-area high schools with best ACT scores

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CHARLOTTE — The ACT is a national college readiness examination that evaluates students in English, mathematics, reading and science. The Charlotte Business Journal has put together a feature that counts down Charlotte-area public high schools by their average composite scores in those four subject areas.

Included are all public and charter schools in Cabarrus, Gaston, Iredell, Mecklenburg and Union counties in North Carolina and Lancaster and York counties in South Carolina with a composite score available. Students are tested as juniors in North Carolina. South Carolina reports the scores of graduating seniors.

As a basis for comparison to local schools’ performance in North Carolina, the 97,770 students in grade 11 who took the ACT test in 2021-22 had an average overall composite mean score of 18.2 out of a possible 36. That average is unchanged from 2020-21, and down slightly from 18.4 in 2018-19. North Carolina did not report scores for the 2019-20 school year.

For South Carolina, the 24,315 public school seniors who graduated in 2021 had a mean composite score of 18.3 — slightly up from the 18.1 average composite score for seniors in the class of 2020.

The national average score was 19.8 for the 1.3 million students in the class of 2022 who took the ACT. That average composite score declined by 0.5 points, from 20.3 in 2021. It is the lowest average score in more than three decades, according to ACT, the nonprofit organization that administers the exam. It also marks the fifth consecutive year of declines.

Among local school districts, Union County Public Schools had the highest percentage of grade 11 students who met all four benchmarks in 2021-22. That figure was 26.7% of the 3,118 test takers. Twenty-one percent of students at Cabarrus County Schools met all four benchmarks, followed by Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools at 20.9%, Iredell-Statesville Schools at 16.8% and Gaston County Schools at 10.1%. For the state of North Carolina, 15.8% of grade 11 test takers in 2021-22 met all four benchmarks.

CMS’ Providence High School achieved the best mean composite score at 24.5.

Check out the rest of the ranking here.

(WATCH BELOW: National report card shows decline in CMS students’ reading, math levels)

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