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SAT Scores Fall as More Students Take the Test
- thrower123 7y agoThis should have been the most predictable result ever. If only the top 20% of students are taking the test, as used to be the case, then the average score is going to be quite high. If you expand that pool with weaker students, it's going to pull the average down. If you make everyone take the SAT, then you are going to wind up with a lot of really low scores dragging that average down hard. They run into this all the time with mandated standardized testing. In smaller school districts, just the relative number of special ed students from class to class can create so much variance that year-to-year comparisons are useless.
- Nasrudith 7y agoYeah that has been used so many times with the "old test questions prove we are getting stupider!" trope circulating.
- rowanG077 7y agoThere are easy statistical methods to still get useable data from something like this. Average is just the average.
- thrower123 7y agoOh, of course. But statistical illiteracy hurts us badly here. Even just distinguishing between median and mean is beyond the abilities of most popular reporting. As it is, this article is almost worthless. The raw data would be interesting to go through.
- thaumasiotes 7y agoThe official numbers are wildly against you on this. Here are the numbers of testees, total and those scoring 700+ on the math section, for recent years and then in 5-year intervals back to 1999: year takers math 700+ 2018 2,136,539 202,088 2017 1,715,481 120,043 2016 1,637,589 117,067 2015 1,698,521 121,057 2014 1,672,395 123,781 2009 1,530,128 97,296 2004 1,519,870 94,985 1999 1,302,903 71,214 (numbers pulled from https://research.collegeboard.org/programs/sat/data/archived https://research.collegeboard.org/programs/sat/data/archived ) In 1999, 1.3 million students took the SAT and 5.5% of them scored 700+ on the math section. Just last year, 2.1 million took the SAT and 9.5% scored 700+ on the math section! Or year-over-year, we can see that the marginal 421,058 students taking the SAT in 2018 compared to 2017 earned a marginal 82,045 700+ math scores, which at 19.5% is well over double the rate at which testees earned those scores in 2017. This makes it clear that the additional students are mostly long-overlooked geniuses. (In fact, what's happening is that the college board is making it much easier to get a high score. A 720 math in 2018 is a much lower score than a 700 math in 2004. Sometime between 2004 and 2009, they stopped even providing the information of how many students scored 750+ on each section; 700+ is the finest resolution they're willing to provide now.)
- ineedasername 7y agoI work in higher ed tech, and the state I work in has been having showing this trend for more than a decade, losing 2 points or so each year on average.
- lonelappde 7y agoIt's been going on for over 4 decades. They recentered the scaled score in 1995 to account for the downward shift in mean due to expansion of access.
- swebs 7y agoNot surprising. If only a small percentage of students take the test, it's only going to be the students on the top end of the bell curve. If everybody takes the test, you're going to get results that reflects the general population. http://archive.is/6GW9b http://archive.is/6GW9b
- acdha 7y agoThis is the detail which needs to be added to almost all mainstream coverage of education stats — every year you'll see some hand-wringing about U.S. students falling behind internationally and the authors never mention that the effect is much weaker once you correct for the fact the U.S. has a much wider range of students taking most tests. Usually almost all of these metrics come back to the root cause of economic disparities along the spectrum from hard poverty to not being able to afford tutors and SAT prep courses. (This is also why the cool curriculum ideas or charter school concepts we hear about never go anywhere: the TED Talk sounds great but inevitably once it scales up it turns out that the effects were due to some sort of selection bias (quite possibly unintentional) or simply lucky small sample sizes which peters out at larger scale)
- _Nat_ 7y ago> from hard poverty to not being able to afford tutors and SAT prep courses. I went to a pretty fancy prep school with a lot of rich folks, but I don't think most did any special prep for the SAT. I think we had a class period where they talked about the sorts of questions that appear on the exam, told us about when/where it'd be offered, etc., along with ads for SAT-prep services, but I think a lot of folks ended up deciding it would be best to get a good-night's sleep before walking in on it. (We also debated stuff like if drinking coffee or/and having a chocolate bar beforehand would be helpful.) Which isn't to downplay the advantages that affluent students enjoy, just, I don't think that SAT prep courses are really the big thing. (Plus I suspect that students who spend a lot of time doing test-specific prep are losing out on their actual education that they'll actually need later on.)
- gumby 7y ago
- rjkennedy98 7y agoIs it all because more students take the test? Reports of falling IQ scores in many developed countries have been pretty well documented. Perhaps it is starting to happen in the US also.
- pmart123 7y agoI believe IQ scores are rising still for lower scores, but falling for the top 1-2%?
- gwern 7y agoThe very most recent US Flynn effect study finds the opposite pattern, actually (falling for low end, rising for high end): https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2019-platt.pdf https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2019-platt.pdf Personally, I don't buy it. The Flynn effect is large enough, and the way the normal distribution works with tail effects, that if there were any Flynn effect in general (much less focused on the high end), that you should see dramatic effects like several-fold increases in the number of perfect SAT scores. You don't see anything remotely like that - even despite loads of countervailing factors like increases in SAT access and prep!
- SamReidHughes 7y agoIntelligence isn’t normally distributed though. E: And even if it was, and was capable of “shifting” left or right, which is a nonsensical notion about populations, a shift of a few IQ points wouldn’t have a dramatic many-fold increase in perfect scores.
- gwern 7y agoYou're right, intelligence, like anything else (eg height), is not exactly normally distributed: it has fatter tails than a normal distribution - so a shift in the mean would increase the density at a high threshold even more than you would calculate based on a normal.
- knappa 7y agoA more interesting statistic would be the (percentage) change in the number of students whose scores indicate that they are college-ready. Increasing that number is, presumably, what these get-more-kids-to-take-the-SAT programs are about.
- user982 7y agoAccording to the article that percentage dropped to 45% from 47% last year, but since ~100,000 more students took the exam the absolute number of college-ready graduates rose by ~3000.
- knappa 7y agoThank you, the corresponding Washington Post article (which I have access to) does not seem to have that information.
- user982 7y agoGiven only the above values, how many students took the SAT this year?
- username90 7y agoIf I am reading this right, we added 100k students got 3k new college ready ones? So 3%? Seems like we are grasping at straws here. Or is college readiness trending down for other reasons?
- erikstrand 7y agoFor context, in the US there are 15.3 million students enrolled in high school, 3.7 million of which are expected to graduate this year (i.e. a little under a quarter, as one would expect) [1]. So the 2.2 million graduate test takers mentioned in the WSJ article represent about 60% of the pool of fresh high school graduates. Also given the surrounding numbers sum to 100%, I'm guessing the author meant to say 56% percent of SAT test takers have parents with a college degree, rather than "56% of students whose parents have a degree took the test". Probably just a careless mistake, but I still find it ironic (or perhaps indicative) that no editors caught it even though it appears a few sentences after "students struggled most in math". [1] https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372#PK12_enrollment https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372#PK12_enroll...
- JJMcJ 7y agoLet's not forget that many "great schools" are really cram academies for the SAT.
- jackcosgrove 7y agoHow do you cram for the SAT? I've always understood the ACT as more about content and the SAT as more about aptitude, which means studying for the SAT is less useful than studying for the ACT. You can teach test-taking strategies but those hardly require 2.5 years. I agree some schools provide a better learning environment than others, and also engage in selective admissions either explicitly or via the socioeconomic status of the students' parents. Both of those could cause standardized test scores to improve but I wouldn't call it cramming.
- JJMcJ 7y ago> more about aptitude Though this was some years ago, I took both ACT and SAT and found them almost identical. I know SAT at least has added an essay section and otherwise moved away from multiple choice but still, to imagine you can't cram for it seems absurd. In middle 70s, Federal Trade Commission investigated Stanley H. Kaplan, the big test prep company, over advertising that they could raise test scores. Well, investigation showed that yes, Kaplan could raise your SAT scores. Like the College Board claims they can give approximately the same test for decades but somehow you can't study for it? Something doesn't seem right.
- hellocs1 7y agoSource on this? the SAT of the 70s were much more of an IQ test than now. I'd be surprised if Kaplan prep could raise more than 20 or 30 points on average. Also, having used Kaplan's prep material... They're pretty bad. But that was in the early 2010s for myself so they might have fallen in quality.
- JJMcJ 7y agoFriend worked for Kaplan during the time period of the investigation. IQ - you know IQ tests are renormed to reflect education levels, and raw scores mapped to give the bell curve? So an IQ of 100 in 1900 would end up about 70 today. 70 oddly enough the number used to "prove" that people in the less developed world are inferior.
- austincheney 7y agoI am not sure how practical this sort of standardized testing is. I am in the high performance range on most aptitude and general knowledge tests, but I did horribly on the SAT. This didn't slow me down from graduating college and becoming a senior software developer. Likewise, I have seen people who scored supremely high on the SAT that simply cannot perform in the real world.
- jrnichols 7y agoI remember seeing this in Texas a few years ago too. SAT scores fell statewide, which made for anti-Texas fodder, but what was lost was the fact that record numbers of black & hispanic students took it for the first time. https://www.texastribune.org/2012/09/24/texas-sat-scores-drop-participation-rates-surge/ https://www.texastribune.org/2012/09/24/texas-sat-scores-dro...
- IMAYousaf 7y agoI missed 1 question when i took the SAT 6-7ish years ago, resulting in the second highest possible score. It made me a US Presidential Scholars Medal Program Candidate. Take what I say for what it’s worth, which probably isn’t a lot, but I’d like to share my experience and why I believe I scored well. I never took any prep course. I always was of the mindset that the only value they provided was forced practice. I never bought that they taught secrets of test taking. Instead I bought 2 books, and 2 books only. One was the official SAT Guide which was $20ish. Secondly I bought a Kaplan book which just had 12 tests in it for $20. Both of these books were also available in the reference section of the public library. I worked through about a test a week the 4ish months prior to the SAT, and read articles online about the SAT if I came across them. I felt very in the know regarding the test and just flew through it when taking it. I used that score to tutor others for pay, and my friends for free. I found out that just walking people through the test was about confidence, which really jumped people’s score up. Naturally most people I came across were between a 1500 and an 1800 out of 2400. For people below that, they tended to need remedial education to improve their scores. Between 1800 and 2150 usually was a result of understanding patterns in the test and what to look for. Those were learned through some rigor in prep using the two aforementioned books. Finally, for students who wanted to score above a 2150 to a 2400, the differences in those that did and didn’t were not educational content based, but rather big picture problem solving strategy in how to logic through problems and knowing what to look for. The SAT, IMO, is a relatively good predictor of someone’s educational attainment the first time they try one prior to any prep. I scored exactly what I predicted and after $40 of self-study, which could’ve been done for free, I scored what I knew I could.
- js2 7y agoThank you for the comment. Do you have any idea which question you missed?
- IMAYousaf 7y agoHi. Yes. The only section I did not get a perfect on was writing. I missed 1 of the multiple choice questions. I always believed that the grammar choices offered were a bit dubious but it is what it is. Totally possible and probably likely that I just got some grammar rule wrong, though I’d like to think that the test was wrong :)
- sunstone 7y agoRegress to the mean.
- fortran77 7y agoAlso, like it or not, the SAT does predict pretty well how a person would do in a typical college program. Maybe too many people are going to college! And/or we need other types of post-high school education.
- JCharante 7y agoI used to not understand why the SAT was supposed to be a predictor of how someone would do in a college program, but after checking the schedule of my college Chinese class and studying to memorize the material everyday, I've realized that the SAT is just like any midterm or final for a class, albeit a bit broader in subject. If someone studies for the SAT then they'll probably study for their classes. Then again I think I spent a total of seven different days (not 168 hours, just some time spread across seven non-consecutive-days) studying for the SAT, which is nothing compared to what I have to do now. If only I could go back in time and retake the test with my newfound knowledge.
- mercutio2 7y agoI sure didn’t study for the SATs, nor did any of my close friends. Our college educated parents told us to not worry about it.
- MisterTea 7y agoWhen I took the test a perfect score was 1600. Without getting into detail, the day of the test I was late and didnt get enough sleep. I wound up getting an 1160 and I never studied. Though, my grades were shit so the good unis rejected me outright. The interesting part was one of the principals A/A+ list students was next to me at the college fair and hung his head in shame when they asked him about his SAT score and he replied with 900. A fucked up D student with an 1160 and a studious A student with a 900 both turned down. Go figure.
- neonate 7y agohttp://archive.is/6GW9b http://archive.is/6GW9b
- MayorMonty 7y ago(For perspective, I'm still in High School, and have scored pretty well on the SAT) I think what a lot of people fail to realize is that the SAT being based on Aptitude is intentional. Doing well on the SAT means knowing how to study for the SAT (with an advantage given to those who do well in school). That's what the test is measuring, your ability to study.
- ledauphin 7y agoyes and no. anecdotally, I did quite well on the SAT and never did a minute of study for it. it is certainly possible to study for it, but it is also possible to just be naturally very good at standardized testing.
- MayorMonty 7y agoYes, and those who are naturally good at standardized testing (such as myself) have an advantage on the SAT, which is one of its issues. But as far as College Board is concerned, the actual content is largely irrelevant. SAT Math does not test number sense or ability to reason with abstsactions, instead how effective you are at applying a specific set of memorized rules. SAT ERW does test comprehension, but only in a very specific context. The College Board specifically chooses passages that are meant to be boring, so the reader skims them. SAT Reading is mostly about the grit of paying attention to detail. SAT Writing, of course is about applying specific prescriptivist grammar rulesets (no singular they comes to mind) Fundamentally, SAT is designed to be a test of attention to detail and studying, not content mastery. Schools will look at transcripts, AP Tests, or SAT Subject Tests to determine that.
- noahlt 7y agoRelated: US average marathon times have fallen in the past 20ish years, as more people run marathons. It's a good thing.
- dmurray 7y agoYou mean they've increased?
- thaumasiotes 7y agoAs I point out elsewhere in the thread, the proportion of new testees getting very high scores is much higher than the proportion that were getting high scores before, so this would be like if US average marathon times had risen (falling times are good, not bad) in the past 20ish years as a lot of professional marathon runners started to participate. It doesn't make any sense given the raw data.
- lifeisstillgood 7y agoA UK perspective - my son is now 10 and is in the age for taking two tests - an 11+ test and a UK SAT test. They are basically the same thing and roughly analogous I think to the US tests. The 11+ score may affect which secondary school he attends (some schools in this part of the UK can be selective and so would choose to take only the higher scoring kids. However at 11 the predictive power is less good and there is sufficient competition that the selective cut off gets pushed down. anyway it helps him if he wants to go to a selective school The SAT - meh. It will affect the school ranking - but has no affect positive or negative for the pupil and as such seems pointless for him to worry about or even take.
- Vrondi 7y agoNo. The SAT in the USA is a test people take in secondary school to get into university. Very few 10-year-olds would be taking it.
- selimthegrim 7y agoCertain gifted programs, eg JHU's CTY would administer it slightly later.
- mercutio2 7y agoHmm. I took the SAT when I was 11, not sure how common that is. I think it was pretty commonly used for admission to gifted programs in the 80s when I took it. When I learned that the PSAT existed, I was curious why that wasn’t used, instead, but... whatever.
- caseysoftware 7y agoInteresting side effect of this: Before - if 100 people took the test, there were 10 people in the top 10%. Now - if 1000 people take the test, there are 100 people in the top 10%. If we assume that most of the first 100 were already college track/high achievers/however you want to describe them, then you just bumped a significant chunk of those people into the top 10%. Obviously, some of the other 900 will also move into that group but - based on the overall average dropping - not a huge number. Fundamentally, it causes another form of "grade inflation" but for the tests themselves. No wonder students apply to more and more schools. :(
- mamayoyox 7y agoOn hypothesis is that strong/indepdent women prefer someone who they can control and they marry immigrants or men with lower IQ ability (hence less desire for autonomy and personal freedom) which reduces overall IQ of the population SAT is just proxy for IQ. Many of my female friends who are at job and are indepdent are marrying wallmart guys (who are good looking but don't have good job) What was considered masculinity is now considered toxic. Women now prefer less confident/dominant men (confidence comes from success which has IQ and Luck components) Masculinity is strongly positively correlated to IQ.
- mamayoyox 7y agoOn hypothesis is that strong/indepdent women prefer someone who they can control and they marry immigrants or men with lower IQ ability (hence less desire for autonomy and personal freedom) which reduces overall IQ of the population SAT is just proxy for IQ. Many of my female friends who are at job and are indepdent are marrying wallmart guys (who are good looking but don't have good job) What was considered masculinity is now considered toxic. Women now prefer less confident/dominant men (confidence comes from success which has IQ and Luck components) Masculinity is strongly positively correlated to IQ.
- mamayoyox 7y agoOn hypothesis is that strong/indepdent women prefer someone who they can control and they marry immigrants or men with lower IQ ability (hence less desire for autonomy and personal freedom) which reduces overall IQ of the population SAT is just proxy for IQ. Many of my female friends who are at job and are indepdent are marrying wallmart guys (who are good looking but don't have good job) What was considered masculinity is now considered toxic. Women now prefer less confident/dominant men (confidence comes from success which has IQ and Luck components) Masculinity is strongly positively correlated to IQ.
- mikelyons 7y agoSeems like SAT scores skew in the direction of people who are capable of "giving a shit" about a test. If you don't "give a shit" about tests, then you'll likely be at most a C student and a ~1150 (just an example number) on the SAT regardless of your level of intelligence.
- peter303 7y agoAnother interpretation is that young people are becoming dumber given their obsession with smartphones and videogames. The skills I needed to master before the "everything online" era where more mentally challenging and strengthening than the current era. I would call this the 'reverse Flynn effect' after the sociologist who observed average IQ scores were rising a few points each decade for a century. That had been attributed to universal schooling, sophisticated new electronic media, white collar knowledge workers, etc. But now we have reached a turning point perhaps due mental dependence on wired devices.