Washington Post on SAT scores

There is something very weird about today's Washington Post editorial about declining SAT scores. The paper is all worked up because the average score seems to have dropped a few points. The Post is worried this could indicate that something is wrong with the new SAT tests developed by the College Board. Here is the important paragraph:

"The scores announced yesterday for the high school class of 2006 are the first since the College Board revamped the SAT, taking out the analogies that defined the test for generations of previous students, increasing the reading portion and adding a writing exam. Reading and math scores both dropped, to an average national score of 1021 out of 1600. The annual drop in critical reading scores, from 508 to 503, was the largest in 31 years."

The editorial is really trying to make people concerned about this allegedly dramatic downswing in test scores. Leaving beside the issue if SATs are really a useful tool to measure student achievement, it's important to note that the decrease in scores is actually not very large. From Talking Points Memo:

"Sounds bad. But how dramatic was the drop? Well, reading went from 508 to 503 and math went from 520 to 518. That doesn't sound especially dramatic to me. Say you knew two families with kids applying to college. One kid gets a 1028 on his SAT and the other kid gets a 1021. Are you really going to say something dramatically different to the parents of Kid B? If Kid B's parents were all freaked out because their kid did seven points worse than Kid A, wouldn't you tell them to chill out? Certainly, I would."

It seems clear that there isn't really a crisis of low student performance. However, let's assume that there really is a problem and test scores are declining. Could it be because there is a new test and all the test prep companies haven't mastered the material? This drop in scores could simply be an indication of how more privileged students do when they don't have as much extra help. Frankly, this test might even be a better yardstick to measure students because it helps level the playing field.

That said, I still think that using standardized tests for college admissions is mostly useless. Students should be evaluated on long-term performance, community involvement, and other more tangible factors. Testing is both unfair and unhelpful measure of academic potential.