SAT Reading Scores Are the Lowest They've Been in 40 Years

Coming in with an average SAT reading score of 496, 2012's graduating
seniors have the dubious distinction of having attained the worst
reading score since 1972. (For those test-takers of a certain age and
test-taking history, "reading" is actually that part we knew as
"verbal.") Regardless of what you call(ed) it, "The average reading
score for the Class of 2012 was 496, down one point from the previous
year and 34 points since 1972," reports the Washington Post's Emma Brown, gleaning numbers from the College Board, the organization that administers the test. 

What's troubling beyond the low average score is that seniors' scores
in "writing," a section related to "reading" and for most of us, life in
some way or another, also dropped—to 488—a decrease of nine points
since the College Board started testing for it in 2006. So what gives?
Are future generations illiterate? Is the SAT too hard? As Po Bronson wrote for
the Daily Beast in 2009, "It’s commonly said that the SAT, taken in a
senior year of high school, has only about a 40% correlation with a
student’s freshman year college GPA." That line of thinking implied by
that statement is that numbers are just numbers, to some extent, and not
predictors of future successes, necessarily. They are general
predictors of who will get into which colleges, though, and Bronson goes
on to defend the SAT, writing, "I’ve always had a skeptical feeling
about the 40% correlation statistic, and so I’ve never relied on it or
used it in print." 

Brown writes that the reading scores may have been affected by minority
test takers, who came out and took the test in record numbers: "The
declining national reading averages may in part reflect the
ever-widening pool of students who take the SAT, first administered in
1926 to a few thousand college applicants." She continues, "More than
1.66 million graduating seniors last year took the test, the highest
number in history. Nearly half were minorities and about a quarter
reported that English was not exclusively their first language. More
than a quarter of public school test-takers — 27 percent — had family
income low enough to qualify for a fee waiver, and more than a third —
36 percent — reported that their parents had not gone to college."

More kids taking the SAT is probably a good thing, though the sweeping
assumption that minority test takers are naturally worse than their
non-minority counterparts at the "reading" section doesn't tell the
entire story, either. As Bronson wrote, "It’s still worthwhile to
explore why people succeed, both at school and in real life." The
reverse is true, too.

Source & Image : Yahoo