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The States with the Best Scores in the USA Announced
The advent of the website FindTheBest has made it very easy for parents and students to track down which states across the nation have the best exam scores. The site makes infographics based on reliable information inputted by different government agencies. Recently, they put out an infographic on education throughout the United States based on Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), American College Testing (ACT), Advanced Placement (AP) and National Assessment of Education Progress tests (NAEP) scores as provided by the department of education of each state.
The Mason-Dixon Line, which was formulated in the 18th century by Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon to help settle a border dispute, is used to this day as a border convention (both in cartography and in conversation) that divides America into Northern and Southern hemispheres. Oddly enough, the Mason-Dixon Line also seems to hold some significance with regard to the test scores and corresponding Public Schools Ratings throughout the different states.
The results indicate that Northern American states (marked green/yellow on the chart below) have a significantly better Public Schools Rating than their Southern counterparts (marked orange/red on the chart above), with the exception of Kentucky, West Virginia, Rhode Island and Indiana (the very noticeable orange/red spots on the right side of the Northern American region, indicated above).
The highest-scoring states were Minnesota (4.92), Massachusetts (4.92) and New Hampshire (5.00). All three of these states are located in the upper half of the United States. Conversely, the states with the lowest scores are Nevada, Texas, New Mexico, Arkansas, Louisiana (all with a Public Schools Rating of 2.98) and Mississippi (2.97).
No clear pattern can be seen with regard to the proximity of these states to one another which ironically, also renders the Mason-Dixon Line viewpoint invalid. For example, the states that are on the border—specifically Arkansas and Mississippi—didn’t do any better than the states further south such as Hawaii or Alaska. This suggests that the north/south differences in scores may be incidental or having more to do with the different ways in which systems are implemented throughout those states, than it has to do with the specific location of a certain state. These are matters of progress that FindTheBest hopes to help the education sector visualize and map out so as to track educational progress throughout the coming years.
Another notable factor in the distribution of scores is that in the north, the way the states are divided makes it so that each of the states are much smaller, this indicates that the rate of the scores throughout one state in the Northern hemisphere of America means high results for a significantly smaller specific population. On the other hand, in the southern part of America, the states are very big, sprawling—thus, indicating that a higher group of people didn’t score well on these tests.
On the upside, however, upon tallying the final number of the states recorded, only 20 states didn’t do so well on the various student aptitude tests (orange/red) whereas 30 states did significantly better on the said tests. Despite the uneven nature of distribution of the US populace throughout these states, statistically we can see that a significant number of the population were able to get good grades.
