LITTLE ROCK — The annual Arkansas high school grade-inflation report needs revamping if it’s going to influence the awarding of Arkansas Lottery Scholarships, an education researcher told state lawmakers Wednesday.
Sean Mulvenon, director of the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville’s National Office for Research on Measurement and Evaluation Systems, told the Joint Subcommittee on Grade Inflation that the data analyzed in the grade-inflation report do not fully capture whether students are college-ready.
Yet the report will make it harder for students who graduate from grade-inflating schools to earn the $5,000 annual scholarships starting next year.
Mulvenon said changes are needed so students who graduate from grade-inflating high schools aren’t at a disadvantage.
“The lottery is generating some nice funds for education. It’s fantastic,” Mulvenon said. “But the present methodology isn’t really congruent with what you are trying to do, at least currently.”
By law, seniors must graduate high school with at least a 2.5 grade-point average or an ACT score of 19 to be eligible for a lottery scholarship.
Starting next year, however, graduates of schools on the grade-inflation list have to earn both the 2.5 gradepoint average and an ACT score of 19.
The requirement was delayed a year by lawmakers setting up the scholarship program when concerns arose about the list’s accuracy. Originally, there were 58 schools on the grade-inflation list, but the list later shrank to 52 schools.
The joint subcommittee is tasked with studying the issue and deciding whether the law needs to be altered next session.
“This is a thing that has a broad interest and a lot of implications that we maybe didn’t think of to begin with,” said state Rep. Bill Abernathy, D-Mena, who is co-chairman of the subcommittee.
Mulvenon, whose agency creates the annual grade-inflation report according to requirements laid out in Arkansas Code Annotated 6-15-421, said the major problem with the calculation relates to its reliance on student performance on End-of-Course Exams.
Law requires that a high school be placed on the list if at least 20 percent of students who earned at least a B in Algebra I or geometry fail to earn a passing grade on the corresponding End-of-Course Exam.
This measure shouldn’t be linked to the awarding of lottery scholarships because it’s only a snapshot of students’ performance in two classes, Mulvenon said. It’s not a measure of performance over an entire academic career.
He said the measure is also inappropriate because it makes it harder for students to earn lottery scholarships on the basis of others’ performance.
Legislators could improve the calculation by dropping the End-of-Course Exam requirement and requiring instead the use of the ACT in the grade-inflation report’s calculations, Mulvenon said.
The ACT measures knowledge in math and literacy built over the course of a high school career, not just in two classes. The nationally standardized test has also been proved to be a predictor of college readiness, Mulvenon said.
“The most important thing that you need to do ... is really emphasize what the real goal of the program is,” he said, “which is to give scholarships to those deserving students on sound, academically based measures that have been shown to be effective at predicting or demonstrating college success.”
State Sen. Jimmy Jeffress, D-Crossett, who is co-chairman with Abernathy, said the subcommittee could end the concern over grade inflation affecting lottery-scholarship eligibility by making a minimum ACT score of 19 the sole criteria.
He questioned why the law was written so that students at schools that don’t inflate grades needed the option of the ACT score or the minimum grade-point average of 2.5 to be eligible for a scholarship.
Jim Purcell, director of the Arkansas Department of Higher Education, said the dual metrics were written into law to make lottery scholarships available to both high and low achievers. He also said it was a “somewhat political” decision.
Jeffress said: “That still doesn’t explain why a 19 on the ACT wouldn’t be sufficient. That’s a pretty low score that would gather in those lower-performing students.”
“Why don’t we just go to the one indicator, and it would seem to solve this right now?” he asked
The subcommittee next meets April 27.
Arkansas, Pages 9 on 04/01/2010