Student SAT Scores are Lowest in Decade

News just out today about our country's high-school students and their poor performance on SAT college-entrance exams. There is a bigger gap now between minority groups (who score lower) and the overall population. This raises the question, which I have been covering for the last year in my website http://www.roccobasile.net/, about the quality of education in the U.S. This news is really sad.

Apparently the average scores for the class of 2008 were as follows:
502 for the critical-reading section;
515 for mathematics; and
494 for writing.
Note: Each section judged on a 200 to 800 point scale.

These scores match the averages last year in 2007. What this means is that the combined scores remain at the lowest level this current decade. Reading scores over the past two years were the lowest since 1994, while math represented the worst since 2001.

The really bad news is that African-American students only received an average critical reading score of 430, which is 72 points below the general population and also three points beneath the 2007 level.

what does all this mean? The wide variations among different groups of students taking the SAT tests has now fueled yet another debate on the effectiveness of our system's test-preparation courses aiming to improve the performance and SAT scores.

According to the College Board, a New York-based nonprofit that oversees the SAT test, says the stalled scores stem from a larger and more diverse group of students taking the test.

In total, more than 1.5 million students from the high-school class of 2008 took the SATs. That is two percent more than in 2007 and eight percent more than five years ago. Minority SAT takers comprise 40 percent of test takers, up from one third in the last 10 years.

--Rocco Basile