Asian students continue to post the greatest average increases among racial and ethnic groups, and average scores for students from wealthy families were highest of all.
The report also highlights a gap in average scores between students who completed a core academic curriculum, and who took honors or college-level coursework, and those who didn’t.
“This report confirms that there are no tricks and there are no shortcuts to college readiness,” says Gaston Caperton, president of the non-profit College Board, which released the report today. “Students who take more rigorous courses in high school are more prepared to succeed in college and beyond.”
Test takers averaged 1,509 points out of a possible 2,400 in three sections, the same as last year.
Nearly 1.6 million 2010 high school graduates took the test, a record. The report says SAT performance remained “stable” this year even as a larger and increasingly diverse number of students took the test. Typically, average scores drop as more students, and a more diverse range of students, take the test.
Since 2000, math scores have climbed 2 points while critical reading scores have declined 4 points. Over 20 years, critical reading scores have increased 1 point and math scores 15 points.
But critics of standardized testing say aggregate scores of both the SAT and ACT over the last several years suggest that the federal No Child Left Behind law has failed to reform education. The law, which went into effect in the 2003-04 academic year, requires states that want to receive federal funding for schools to develop assessments in basic skills to be given to all students in certain grades.
SAT scores released Monday show a steady decline in average reading scores since 2004, from 508 to 501, and a 2-point drop in that time in average math scores, from 518 to 516. Writing scores have dropped 5 points since that section was added in 2006.
Average composite scores on the ACT college entrance exam have fluctuated between 20.9 and 21.2 (out of 36) since 2003-04; this year’s scores, released last month, averaged 21.0.
At the same time, gaps in SAT and ACT scores by racial and ethnic groups are widening or, at best, remaining steady.
Those data “contradict the claim that more high-stakes testing improves educational quality and equity,”says Robert Schaeffer, spokesman for the National Center for Fair & Open Testing, a critic of standardized tests. “We keep adding more and more high-stakes tests (but) have left more children further behind.”
Average SAT scores fluctuate slightly within class of 2010
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