The ACT test is designed to measure college readiness among high school students in four basic subject areas: English, math, reading and science. Every year students across the country take test and those scores are tallied individually and as an overall average. Scores for the class of 2022 were just released and the results were the lowest they’ve been since 1991.

The class of 2022′s average ACT composite score was 19.8 out of 36, marking the first time since 1991 that the average score was below 20. What’s more, an increasing number of high school students failed to meet any of the subject-area benchmarks set by the ACT — showing a decline in preparedness for college-level coursework.

The test scores, made public in a report Wednesday, show 42% of ACT-tested graduates in the class of 2022 met none of the subject benchmarks in English, reading, science and math, which are indicators of how well students are expected to perform in corresponding college courses.

In comparison, 38% of test takers in 2021 failed to meet any of the benchmarks…

ACT scores have declined steadily in recent years. Still, “the magnitude of the declines this year is particularly alarming,” ACT CEO Janet Godwin said in a statement. “We see rapidly growing numbers of seniors leaving high school without meeting college-readiness benchmarks in any of the subjects we measure.”

As you can see in this bar graph, scores were declining slightly but there’s a larger dip this year:

The number of students taking the test has dropped from 1.9 million in 2018 to about 1.35 million this year. Scores dropped among most but not all racial/ethnic groups who took the test. But Asian students managed to buck the downward trend. Their average scores went from 24.5 in 2018 to 24.7 in 2022. The scores of every other group dropped by about the same amount (0.9 points from 2018-2022).

As for why the scores dropped this year, the immediate consensus seems to be that this is further evidence of pandemic learning loss. Students who spent a lot of time out of classrooms and doing Zoom classes in 2020 and 2021 eventually had that catch up with them. Previous national test scores have shown the decline isn’t just limited to high school seniors. The NY Times published a story last month about a test of 9th graders which also found scores had dropped to levels not seen in 30 years.

National test results released on Thursday showed in stark terms the pandemic’s devastating effects on American schoolchildren, with the performance of 9-year-olds in math and reading dropping to the levels from two decades ago.

This year, for the first time since the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests began tracking student achievement in the 1970s, 9-year-olds lost ground in math, and scores in reading fell by the largest margin in more than 30 years.

The declines spanned almost all races and income levels and were markedly worse for the lowest-performing students. While top performers in the 90th percentile showed a modest drop — three points in math — students in the bottom 10th percentile dropped by 12 points in math, four times the impact.

What this means of course is that all students in the K-12 pipeline have likely been set back. Whether or not returning to school full time will be enough to bring them back to where they would have been without school closures remains to be seen. But it’s at least possible that standardized test scores won’t bounce back and could remain low for years to come.