Are Our Graduates College-Writing Ready?

What High Schools Could Do to Help

By Steven Horwitz

Teachers of the students who graduated from American high schools in the spring may think that their charges are well prepared for the colleges they are entering this fall, but the professors who will greet them on campus disagree, according to a recent national survey .

The differences in perception among 6,568 teachers and professors who responded to the survey, conducted by the educational testing organization ACT Inc., were apparent in virtually every college-preparatory subject.

Perhaps most significantly, the high school teachers surveyed had more confidence that their students were prepared to handle the fundamentals of writing—basic grammar, sentence structure, and punctuation—than...