Through the early 1990s and early 2000s, average scores on the SAT college entrance exam moved steadily upward. Now, for the past five years, they’ve been drifting back down.
A big factor is the larger, more diverse group of students taking the tests, combined with a widening scoring gap between the best-performing groups and those whose numbers are growing fastest.
Results released Tuesday show the high school class of 2009 earned a combined average score of 1,509 on the three sections of the exam, down two points from last year. The average reading and writing scores dropped one point each; math scores held steady.
Experts caution against reading too much into the national average SAT score, given that the test-taking pool changes over time and can vary widely among states. Still, the average score is down nine points since 2006, when the writing section was first included and the test moved to a combined 2,400-point scale.
Math scores are higher over the past decade, but reading scores are four points below their 1999 level.
The College Board, which administers the exam, emphasized the growing diversity of SAT-takers. Minorities made up 40 percent of last year’s group, and more than a quarter of the 1.5 million test-takers reported English was not their first language at home.
That’s good news in that more students aspire to college, but it also weighs down the overall scores because, on average, students from most minority groups score lower.
The exception is Asian- Americans, whose average combined score surged 13 points to a combined 1,623, while scores for whites fell two points to 1,581. For black students, average scores dropped four points to 1,276. Average scores for two of the three categories the College Board uses for identifying Latinos also declined and overall ranged from 1,345 to 1,364.
Men also widened their advantage over women by three points; men scored 1,523 on average, compared with 1,496 for women. The difference comes mostly from math scores.
Students reporting their families earned more than $200,000 scored 1,702, up 26 points from a year ago. That group is comparatively small, but the sharp increase could fuel further criticism that the exam favors students who can afford test-prep tutoring.
The SAT remains the most common college entrance exam, though the rival ACT has nearly caught up in popularity. Most colleges accept either, and a growing minority no longer requires either one.
Still, fewer than half of high school graduates take the three-hour, 45-minute SAT, and the group is tilted toward higher-achieving, college- bound students.
“I just don’t think it’s a good gauge of what’s going on nationally,” said Tom Loveless, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, who said the SAT remains a useful tool, when combined with high school grade-point average, for evaluating how well individual students are prepared for college.
Experts generally pay closer attention to the National Assessment of Educational Progress because, unlike college entrance exams, it represents the entire population of students.
On those exams, K-12 black and Latino students have made bigger gains than whites since the 1970s.
