Indiana released its 2026 ILEARN test scores on August 11, 2026. About 42% of students in grades 3 through 8 passed the English section, and about 43% passed in math, according to Chalkbeat. WFYI put the math figure a little higher, at 42.7%, and agreed on 42% for English. The two numbers describe the same results, reported slightly differently.
For the first time, these scores will help set the A-to-F letter grades that Indiana schools receive (Chalkbeat). At the same August 11 meeting, the State Board of Education approved new passing scores for the ILEARN (Chalkbeat).
State officials warned that the scores should not be compared to past years. Secretary of Education Katie Jenner said the test and the state's standards have both changed lately. A 2022 law told Indiana to trim its K-12 standards, and the test format changed too (WFYI). This was also the first year that all students took three ILEARN checkpoints during the year, followed by a shorter end-of-year test (Chalkbeat). Jenner said the exam is hard and lines up well with a federal test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress. "We have a very tough assessment, tough standards," Jenner said.
The clearest strain showed up in math. Passing rates fell as students got older. Just over half of third and fourth graders passed the math section. That share dropped through the middle grades, down to about 34% of eighth graders (Chalkbeat). English was steadier. It held near 41% in third grade and rose a little to 44% by eighth grade (Chalkbeat). Ana Shults, the department's chief academic officer, tied the math pattern to early gaps. "The difference is in math, that if you have cracks in your foundation early, the ripple effect that that has on all other skills is harder and harder to recover from," Shults said.
The scores also showed gaps between groups of students. About 29% of students who got subsidized meals, a federal marker of poverty, passed the English section. Among students who did not get those meals, 53% passed (Chalkbeat). The state did not release school-level ILEARN data at the meeting, and officials did not say why (Chalkbeat).
Officials also shared IREAD and SAT results. On the IREAD third-grade reading exam, 88.7% of third graders passed. That was up 1.5 percentage points and marked a fifth straight year of gains, though WFYI reported the gain was smaller than last year's jump. The rate still left 9,194 students not reading at grade level by the end of third grade (WFYI). Governor Mike Braun said the state did more than recover. "Our reading scores haven't just recovered from the pandemic. They've surged," Braun said. The 88.7% rate passed the pre-pandemic mark of 87.3% from 2018-19. But it stayed below the state's all-time high of 91.4%, set in 2013 (WFYI).
On the SAT, which all Indiana juniors take, 52% of students met the college-ready mark in reading and writing, and 26% met it in math (Chalkbeat). Another 9% were close to the mark in reading and writing, and 22% were close in math (Chalkbeat). The SAT counts on its own for 10% of a school's grade. Both the ILEARN and the SAT will now feed the state's new A-to-F grades (Chalkbeat).