Nationwide SAT Scores Show Modest Gains

The SAT scores of this year’s college-bound seniors offered encouraging signs of continued improvement nationwide in academic performance, particularly in math, where the results hit a 24-year high.

The overall gains were modest--up two points over last year to 508 in math and one point to 505 in verbal. But education leaders and the College Board, which administers the widely used college admissions test, hailed the increases as evidence that American high school students are taking more demanding academic courses.

The exam results show that the nation’s educational health is strong, said U.S. Education Secretary Richard Riley. But “sustained vigorous exertion [is still] required,” including more daily reading, more challenging course work and moderation of television viewing.

In California, the news was good on two fronts: High school students who took the test chalked up small gains, even as more students, especially minorities, opted to take the exam.

However, California students still ranked 10 points below the national average in verbal performance and lagged in the number of core academic courses that they took to graduate from high school.

“We are moving in the right direction,” California Supt. of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin said, but the increases are “obviously not as much as we want.”

In math, the state results were three points higher than the national average. Both sets of scores have been inching up since 1993, but experts are divided about how to interpret the rise.

Some, like San Francisco State University professor Richard Curci, said it may reflect recent efforts in schools to offer more applied math courses, which focus on real-life problem-solving.

But others contend that those changes in math instruction began too late to influence this group of test-takers and attribute the increase instead to a nationwide push to require students to take more difficult math courses earlier in their school careers.

Some experts were skeptical that the slight boost in SAT scores nationwide is significant and suggested that educators are on “thin ice” in attributing the gains to more rigorous courses or standards.

The College Board introduced a new form of the test last year that was intended to reflect the movement in elementary and secondary education toward more problem-solving in mathematics and more emphasis on reading for meaning and understanding.

Now, students are encouraged to use calculators on the exam’s math problems, for instance, and the SAT’s verbal section contains longer reading passages and eliminates the much-hated antonyms section.

Robert Linn, a professor of education at the University of Colorado at Boulder who has analyzed the changes in the SAT, said the slight increase in this year’s scores may be related to the amount of academic study by students, but is “hardly solid proof” that educators’ efforts to push more students into core academic classes are working.

“If it continues over the course of a decade,” that would be significant, he said, but this year’s gains are too modest to assign great import to them. “I wouldn’t get euphoric about the improvement” of one or two points, he said.

But others said the rise in scores is encouraging, especially since the pool of test-takers is growing broader, reaching far beyond the academic elite that had traditionally taken the college entrance exam.

Across the nation, more minority youngsters are seeking admission to four-year colleges and thus are taking the SAT, which is the exam of choice for 94% of colleges that rely on such measures in making admissions decisions. Almost one-third of the 2 million students who take the test today are minorities, compared to less than one-fourth in 1987.

Even more dramatic has been the change in California,where 55% of the test takers are now African American, Latino, Native American or Asian American, compared to 36% in 1985. Proportionally, the largest growth has occurred among black students, whose numbers increased by 48%. Among other groups, the proportion taking the SAT has grown by 35% among Latinos, 59% among Native Americans and 9% among Asian Americans.

However, minority students tend to lag far behind the nation in performance on both the verbal and math portions of the exam. The only exception is Asian American students, whose math score exceeds the national average by more than 50 points.

The SAT scores of California’s African American and Mexican American students were 60 to 80 points lower than the national average.

These disparities are “not surprising when you have an inequitable education system present throughout the state,” said Harry Pachon, president of the Tomas Rivera Center, a nonprofit research and policy center affiliated with Claremont Graduate School.

“Those in inner-city schools may not have the same opportunities” as students in suburban settings to take honors or advanced placement courses. Enrollment in such courses correlates to higher achievement on exams such as the SAT, the College Board has shown.

Among Mexican Americans, those who took 20 or more yearlong academic courses in math, English and other solid subjects had math and verbal scores on par with the national average, the College Board reported. However, only 23% of Mexican Americans took that many academic classes, compared to 44% of whites and Asian Americans.

To reflect the more diverse student group, the College Board moved last year to adjust the SAT’s scoring scale, a change that generated controversy and complaints that the board was lowering standards.

Fifty years ago, the SAT scoring scale reflected the norm of 10,000 students from predominantly private secondary schools who applied to the nation’s most selective private colleges and universities.

The so-called “recentering” of the scale last year--the first since 1941--made the mean score 500 on a scale of 200 to 800. On the old scale, a mean of 450 meant above-average performance on verbal but below-average on math.

The new scale, according to the College Board, allows more legitimate comparisons between math and verbal scores.

The board maintains that the recalibration does not change historical trend lines, the difficulty level of the test, or the relative standing of students to each other.

But critics, such as Bruno Manno, a fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington D.C. who follows education issues, disagree. Manno faults the re-scaling for making it easier for students to attain a perfect score, and contends that the content changes render invalid comparisons of this year’s scores to previous years. The new test is so different from the old version, “you’re comparing apples and oranges,” he said.

The College Board report also provided cause for concern on another front: The testing agency’s figures on average grades of SAT test-takers suggest that grade inflation is rampant in the nation’s high schools.

Those numbers showed that 35% of the students who took the exam said they had A averages in their high school course work, a 7% rise from 1987. But over the same period, SAT scores stayed flat or dipped slightly. Similar disparities have been found in other studies, including a large-scale examination last year by American College Testing, the Iowa City group that administers the ACT exam.

“We are concerned there may be some grade inflation going on,” Fred Moreno of the College Board said.

Times education writers Amy Pyle and Richard Colvin and researcher Tracy Thomas contributed to this story.

* RESULTS MIXED IN L.A.: Slight gain is seen, but scores lag behind 1991-92 level. B1

* IN VENTURA COUNTY: Scores beat national average. Oxnard posts biggest gain. (Ventura County Edition, B1)

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State SATs

SAT scores have risen slightly but steadily in the past three years among California’s high school seniors.

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Verbal Math ‘95-96 495 511

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