Six Reasons Not To Get Excited About New SAT Scores

A few weeks ago the big--well, not big, medium-sized, maybe--news came from the College Board, which announced that both participation and scores are up, as well as the percentage of college-ready students. Here's why you can comfortably not care.

It's 8 Points

The average score "jumped" from 1060 to 1068. That's 0.7%. If your child retook the test in hopes of a higher score, and that's all they squeaked out, nobody would be trading high fives.

A great job-- but will the SAT tell you if you're ready?

It's An Average (And It's Not News)

If Michael Jordan comes to stay with my family, the average number of points scored in an NBA game goes up dramatically for my household. Nevertheless, the number of points I've scored in an NBA game remains zero.

In fact, the SAT score has always been subject to the make-up of the group taking the test. For years, while folks were chicken littling about dropping SAT scores, what was actually happening was that more and more low-scoring students were taking the test. Meanwhile, each sub-group was actually improving their scores, even as the low-growing sub-groups increased in number. Averages are a lousy way to measure how students are doing.

Participation Numbers Are Coerced

Over the past two years, several states have phased in a requirement that every student (usually in the junior year) must take the SAT. Right now, fifteen states require it, while a few others push it as an alternative. This has been a huge coup for the College Board, which is fighting to keep its market share. It's equivalent of having a state declare that all state employees must drive a Ford as their personal vehicle.

It also means that an increase in participation numbers doesn't mean that individual students are flocking to take the SAT of their own free will.

The College Board Has No Idea Who's College Ready

The increase in students who have hit the benchmarks is not exactly awe-inspiring-- from 46% to 47%. But the benchmarks themselves are not exactly Gospel. Here's the College Board explaining benchmarks while simultaneously demonstrating their command of passive voice:

Students are considered college- and career-ready when their SAT section scores meet both the Math and the Evidence-Based Reading and Writing benchmarks.

Are considered college- and career- ready by whom, exactly? Based on what? Will the guy who's hiring welders say, "Your SAT verbal is really solid, so that's good enough for me"? Will the college theater department say, "You've got good SAT math scores, so you clearly have a future studying acting"?

The college board admits that college readiness is a continuum, not a solid cut-off line. They also advise that no student should be discouraged from attending college based on SAT scores. The language suggests that the benchmarks aren't so much based on an understanding of what math and reading skills are needed for college- and career-readiness, but are more of a number-crunching exercise based on previous testees: "

Students with an SAT Math section score that meets or exceeds the benchmark have a 75 percent chance of earning at least a C in first-semester, credit-bearing college courses in algebra, statistics, pre-calculus, or calculus." These sorts of studies have been conducted in the past, but that means the benchmarks are always looking backwards. 

The Gains Should Be Bigger

In 2012, hot off his stint as co-creator the Common Core, David Coleman was hired to run the College Board. His immediate goal was to redesign the SAT, making it more Core-aligned. Having rewritten the standards for schools across the country, he now set out to create a new SAT that would more closely fit what those standards were producing. So the test prep that was taking over classrooms throughout the US should also have been test prep for the SAT. Scores should have climbed through the roof.

The College Board initially made some noises about the new SAT being impervious to test prep, but that tune has changed.

The SAT Measures SAT Test Prep

Both this year and last, we've been told that the free Khan Academy tutorials have boosted SAT scored tremendously. The point is supposed to be that getting coached to a good SAT score is no longer a privilege of the rich, but is available for free to anyone (with an internet connection). The boosters are so excited about the Free To Everyone point that they seem to miss the other part of what they're saying-- the SAT measures how well the student has been coached to take the SAT. We could talk about the ways that the test favors students from a particular socio-economic background, but in many ways that's part of the same point-- the SAT measures SAT-taking skills.

The SAT is still scrambling to avoid sinking into irrelevance, while colleges and universities increasingly drop the SAT requirement for admission and research continues to show high school GPA a better predictor of college success. Today's news may give them a helpful boost, but there's no need to organize a parade just yet.

Originally posted at Forbes