<<... the officials attributed the drop to a decline in the number of
students who took the exam more than once. The board said 47 percent of
this year's students took the test only once, up from 44 percent last
year. The number taking the test three times fell to less than 13
percent from nearly 15 percent.>>
I would not be surprised if the above is the primary concern of the ETS
corporate honchos. If this trend continues, it may have a significant
impact on their revenues. On September 28 and 30, 1997, the New York
Times published a lengthy front-page expose of the huge racket that is
operated by ETS. By how much has this racket grown during the past 9
years?
ETS and the media have ballyhooed this "improved" test, however I have
not seen a single article questioning why most of the math questions
are still multiple-choice. With a graphing calculator, many SAT
problems can be answered by simply checking which choice is correct.
The December 1992 issue of FOCUS, the newsletter of the Mathematical
Association of America, contained a copy of a Japanese University
Entrance Examination in mathematics. This examination is
machine-graded, but it is not multiple-choice like our idiotic tests.
The students must enter the answer to each problem on a grid, just as
they do on a few problems on our SATs. Again I ask: Why is it that the
testing-racket crowd does not use the Japanese answer sheets? Is this
crowd afraid that the pseudo-education of American students would be
exposed more fully?
Dom Rosa
=========================================
The following document has been sent via ProQuest.
The New York Times 30 Aug 2006 Page A12
Scores on Reading and Math Portions of the SAT Show a Significant
Decline
Author(s): Karen W. Arenson
Document URL:
http://proquest.umi.com/
pqdweb?did=1114847831&Fmt=3&clientId=16778&RQT=309&VName=PQD
The average score on the reading and math portions of the newly
expanded SAT showed the largest decline in 31 years, according to a
report released yesterday by the College Board on the performance of
the high school class of 2006.
The drop confirmed earlier reports from puzzled college officials that
they were seeing lower scores from applicants. The average score on the
critical reading portion of the SAT, formerly known as the verbal test,
fell 5 points, to 503, out of a maximum possible score of 800. The
average math score fell 2 points, to 518. Together they amounted to the
lowest combined score
since 2002.
Officials of the College Board, the nonprofit organization that
administers the SAT, dismissed suggestions by numerous high school
guidance counselors
that students were getting tired out by the new three-part test which
now runs three and three-quarters hours, rather than three.
''Fatigue is not a factor,'' Wayne Camara, vice president for research
and analysis at the College Board said at a news conference. ''We are
not trying to say that students are not tired. But it is not affecting,
on the whole, student performance.''
Instead, students typically gain 14 points a section when they take the
test a second time, and another 10 or 11 points a section on the third
try.
The SAT writing test includes a 25-minute essay, which counts for about
30 percent of the writing score, and 49 multiple-choice questions on
grammar and usage, which count for the rest. The average score on the
writing
section was 497 out of a possible 800, the board said.
Girls performed better than boys on this section of the exam, averaging
502 versus 491 for boys. That partly offset girls' lower scores on math
and reading, but did not close the longstanding score gap between boy
and
girls.
Gaston Caperton, the president of the College Board, pointed out that
the decline in scores represented less than one-half of a test question
in reading and one-fifth of one test question in math. Still it was the
largest year to year decline since 1975, and officials expressed
concerns about the overall performance of American students.
''The data does suggest that as a nation, critical reading and writing
are lagging behind the progress we are making in math,'' Mr. Camara
said.
The SAT score decline contrasted with the increase in scores on the ACT
exam, the other primary college admissions test. This month, ACT
reported its biggest
score increase in 20 years. The ACT also has a writing section, but it
is optional.
Seppy Basili, senior vice president at Kaplan Inc., the education and
test preparation company, said the new SAT test undoubtedly affected
scores because students were less familiar with it and because fewer
students repeated it. But Mr. Basili said he thought the length played
a greater role than the College Board acknowledged.
''It is not just that the test is 3 hours and 45 minutes,'' he said.
''It is that the whole experience is five hours or more,'' he said,
factoring in things
like breaks.
Most states, including New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, saw scores
decline in reading and math. In New York, average reading scores fell 4
points to 493
and math scores 1 point to 510. In Connecticut, reading was down 5
points to 512 and math 1 point to 516. In New Jersey, reading fell 7
points to 496 and math 2 points to 515.
In New York City, Joel I. Klein, the chancellor of the education
department, said, ''My only reaction is, it shows that we have to
continue to work harder.''
The number of students taking the SAT nationally fell slightly, by
about 10,000 students, to just under 1.5 million, or about 48 percent
of more than 3 million
students who graduated from high school this year.
At a time when many elite colleges have expressed interest in
recruiting more low-income students, the number of students from
families earning $30,000 or
less who took the SAT fell by more than 13 percent, to 183,317, while
the number from families earning $100,000 or more rose 8 percent, to
225,869.
Mr. Camara said that of the information collected about students, the
income data was the least reliable. He said he did not know what
accounted for the decrease in low-income students taking the test.
Counselors in high schools where the SAT has long dominated, said more
of their students were taking the ACT. Some have said that in the wake
of the College
Board's disclosure this spring that it had mis-scored more than 5,000
exams, they have urged their students to consider the ACT.
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