So the news is good from the College Board: SAT scores are up sharply. That suggests that the strategies of recent years have been paying off, that students are taking more academic courses, and that they have greater incentive to prepare for tests like the SAT. Maybe they know more mathematics and have a better vocabulary because of the regime of standards and testing.
Perhaps that's so, but it is hard to connect these dots without better information. One piece of information that is definitely lacking is a long timeline. The New York Times, for example, printed SAT test scores only from 1993 to 2003.
Anyone who has been following the decades-long debate about the decline (and rise?) of SAT scores would know that 1993 is not the right place to begin. The famous SAT score decline began in 1964; scores hit bottom about 1980 and have slowly begun to come up since then, at least in math.
Tracking the SAT score trends became much harder after 1994, the year the College Board decided to "recenter" the scores. For reasons that I have trouble remembering, the College Board decided to declare that the 1994 average scores in both verbal and math were 500. This was an immense boost for verbal scores, which had languished around 430 for a whole generation. So, voila, "average" scores were re-pegged at whatever they were in 1994.
Now the New York Times would have us believe that 1993 was the starting point for SAT scores. If they knew of the long and contentious history of the SAT scores, if they knew that the scores were "recentered" in 1994, why couldn't they have taken the time to show the progress of SAT scores since 1964, when they were at their peak? Instead they have just added to the fog generated by the College Board for the past decade, making it impossible to know what the trend lines are, and whether they have reached or surpassed or fallen short of the levels attained by students a generation ago.
The College Board decided that the public should use 1993 as the baseline, not 1963. Why has the New York Times gone along with this decision?
Diane Ravitch, research professor of education at New York University and holder of the Brown chair in education at the Brookings Institution, is a trustee of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.
"SAT ABC's," editorial, Wall Street Journal, August 29, 2003 (subscription required)
"High school seniors get highest SAT math scores in 35 years," by Diana Jean Schemo, New York Times, August 27, 2003
