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The U.S. military is seeing lower scores on its Armed Forces Qualification Test.
At Texas State Technical College, a two-year college based in Waco, students increasingly have to take a basic math class alongside their college-level courses to get ready for careers in welding, heating and air conditioning, and manufacturing.
And at selective four-year colleges, professors complain that students have lost their reading and writing stamina.
New national test results for 12th graders, released this month, showed significant declines in students’ math and reading abilities since 2019, results that are now being felt in college and the labor market.
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“My students now, they leave high school and don’t have the capacity to read a lengthy 25-page article. They don’t know what to do with it,” said Deepak Sarma, a humanities professor at Case Western Reserve University, where the average reported SAT score is between 1440 and 1520. Dr. Sarma recently counseled a student daunted by a dense academic article, suggesting basic tactics like printing it out in order to highlight and underline key passages.
On the national test, students’ reading scores were the worst in three decades, and math scores were the lowest since 2005.
