Angelica Harris took drastic action to raise her ACT score: She dropped out of high school.
Harris, who is Black, had been a high-achieving "A" student at one of the top private schools in New Orleans. When she took the ACT at the end of her sophomore year, she was shocked by the result. She scored a 16 -- below the national average of 19.5, and significantly below the 33-to-35 score range for the elite colleges for which she was aiming.
“I was very disappointed and taken aback,” said Harris, now 26. “It didn’t make sense.”
Was this a reflection of grade inflation? Was her school teaching things that weren’t assessed on the tests, or measuring it differently? Was she not as smart as adults led her to believe?
That score shook her confidence.
Harris signed up for one of the brand-name test-prep courses. It only brought her score to an 18. She realized she needed to learn math and grammar concepts she had never truly mastered. So, she left the school where she was a star student and athlete and enrolled in an online program from home that also offered numerous AP courses. And she buckled down on the test.
“I almost reverse-engineered the test. I categorized all the questions on the ACT and backtracked,” Harris said.
She raised her score dramatically -- doubling it to a 32 -- and accepted a full-ride scholarship to Washington University in St. Louis. She graduated in 2021 with degrees in computer science and finance. The following year, she earned her master's in computer science from WashU.
Clearly, Harris’ initial ACT score failed to represent her intelligence, ability and potential. It showed her how often Black students get shut out of opportunities because they haven’t been prepared for these gatekeeping standardized tests, the results of which largely reflect the socioeconomic status of the test-takers.
While 20% of white students from the class of 2023 who took the ACT were deemed college-ready in all four subject areas -- English, math, reading and science -- the same was true for just 3% of Black test-takers, according to the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education.
Harris freelanced as a standardized test tutor in college and helped students make significant gains in their scores. In the summer of 2022, she participated in an entrepreneurship accelerator program and began doing research on the test-prep market.
After dozens of interviews, she found that most commercial programs failed to meet the needs of Black and brown students. Lower-income students were priced out of programs that cost thousands of dollars.
“Their stories felt similar to mine,” she said.
It led to her launching an education startup, Top Tutors for Us, which offers test prep focusing on the needs of Black students.
Harris recruited high-scoring Black tutors from colleges nationally and created an app to match them with high-schoolers working to improve their scores. The algorithm takes into account tutors’ cultural background, test scores and leadership. The high school students take an assessment that evaluates their strengths and weaknesses across the test. Then, the tutor creates personalized lesson plans specifically for each student that pinpoint the gaps in their learning.
All the tutoring is done remotely. From 2022 to 2023, her company worked with 250 students across the country.
Kiera Kaba, a sophomore at WashU, has worked as a tutor for students in the St. Louis Public Schools since the fall semester. She sees how bias in standardized test questions impacts student scores.
“The ACT is unfair, and it knows it is asking questions that wealthy white people are familiar with, and it will leave other students behind,” she said. Her students have improved significantly over the sessions, Kaba added.
A number of selective colleges recently announced they would reinstate ACT and SAT scores as mandatory parts of their admissions process. The universities bringing back the tests after a pandemic-induced hiatus say that their student bodies are less diverse without it. There hasn’t been any data offered by those universities to substantiate those claims yet.
Harris sees the growth potential for her company in the $30 billion test-prep market. She is already working with four schools within SLPS and adding schools around the country. When districts sign on, they can offer her services for free to the students, addressing the inequities so prevalent in test prep.
Harris hadn’t planned on this becoming her full-time job, but she now has a software developer, three part-time business analysts and 171 tutors working for her organization. Her tutors do more than prepare students for a test. They also inspire them as mentors and improve their overall skills as students.
Her success proves that students are so much more than a number.