ACT College Readiness Test Scores

Reporting year. For 2011-2024 this is the spring (ending) calendar year of the school year in the source's LONG_SCHOOL_YEAR; for 2004-2010 the source carries no year column and the filename publication year is used.

GOSA district code (FK to districts dimension): 3-digit zero-padded county/city codes or 7-digit state-charter codes. NULL on state-level rows.

GOSA school code, zero-padded to 4 characters (composite FK to schools dimension with district_code; not globally unique on its own). NULL on district- and state-level rows.

ACT section. composite, english, mathematics, reading, and science are reported in all years (2004-2010 label science as 'Science Reasoning'); writing_subscore appears from 2011 onward; combined_english_writing only in 2011-2015 (students who took both English and the optional Writing section).

Number of students tested. 2004-2010 sources publish one count per school/district/state entity, which is repeated on each of that entity's five test_component rows; 2011-2024 sources publish true per-component counts. In either case, summing num_tested across test_component double-counts students — filter to one component (typically composite) for headcounts.

Average ACT scaled score. The 1-36 ACT scale applies to every test_component except writing_subscore, which the source reports on the ACT writing domain 2-12 scale (typical statewide averages 6-7) in every year EXCEPT 2016: ACT's September 2015-June 2016 'enhanced writing' window reported writing on a 1-36 scale, so 2016 writing_subscore values run 11.8-23.1 (mean ~17.2) vs 4.2-8.5 in all other years — do not read 2016 as a writing-performance jump in time series. The [1, 36] range check below bounds all components and years. NULL when GOSA suppressed the value (too few test-takers). Known source defects NULLed by the transform per data-cleaning-standards §4b (rows and num_tested preserved): (a) the 2006 publication reported 10 impossible values of 36.9-41.5 (above the ACT scale maximum of 36) across the five sections for Campbell High School (district 633, school 1054) and Cedar Grove High School (district 644, school 0172) — any avg_score outside [1, 36] is NULLed; (b) the 2009 Atlanta City district rows (district 761) published scores of 34.2-35.5 while the district's own school rows bound every section at or below 17.7 — the five district avg_score values are NULLed (num_tested 949 is consistent with the school rows and preserved). This revises the preserve-bronze default for this column; the 1-36 range check below remains enforceable because of it.