Posted on 09/14/2011 12:04:13 PM PDT by Mind Freed
Scores on the critical reading portion of the SAT college entrance exam fell three points to their lowest level on record last year, and combined reading and math scores reached their lowest point since 1995.
The College Board, which released the scores Wednesday, said the results reflect the record number of students from the high school class of 2011 who took the exam and the growing diversity of the test-taking pool -- particularly Hispanics. As more students aim for college and take the exam, it tends to drag down average scores.
Still, while the three-point decline to 497 may look small in the context of an 800-point test, it was only the second time in the last two decades reading scores have fallen as much in a single year. And reading scores are now notably lower than scores as recently as 2005, when the average was 508.
Average math scores for the class of 2011 fell one point to 514 and scores on the critical reading section fell two points to 489.
Other recent tests of reading skills, such as the National Assessment of Education Progress, have shown reading skills of high-school students holding fairly steady. And the pool of students who take the SAT is tilted toward college-goers and not necessarily representative of all high school students.
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/09/14/sat-reading-scores-fall-to-lowest-level-on-record/#ixzz1XxGDsPUo
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Analogies, eh?
How about:
Barack Obama is to America, as _______ is to victim.
a) Mugger
b) Rapist
c) Assailant
d) all of the above
They made the test easier, and they added a hundred or more points to every score. That’s why there are so many more “perfect” scores these days than there were in the 80s; it was incredibly rare then to achieve a 1600, almost unknown. Now scores that would have been in the mid-1400s are “perfect.”
At the high end of SAT performers, it probably doesn’t make much difference in terms of their overall college success, but the changes to testing and scoring serve to disguise how much the content level of secondary schooling has been diminished.
Good one!
“If we gave a $1T to the teachers unions, could we turn this around???”
Yes! That’s the solution! But shouldn’t it be $2 trillion just to be on the safe side? ;-)
You should work for the College Board.
I'm still confused how knowing what words mean is racist. Does it have something to do with the analogies not indicating that "friction from boxer shorts" would also be an answer if the correct answer is belt?
Children now days score very high marks on ,, 1) global warming , 2) unions are for your protection , 3) how to use a condom , 4) that homosexuality is an acceptable alternative , 5) and that government can fix all your problems .
If the teachers and unions are not part of the equation and we are still throwing billions at the system then what remains?
Parents? Well, maybe in some cases, yes.
Diversity? Ding, ding, ding we have a winner. Thanks to the woman killer Ted Kennedy and his hatred of any more white Europeans entering this country we have been giving preference to 3rd world types who in many cases are not even familiar with indoor plumbing and we expect test scores to stay the same or rise?
Come on we cannot dilute the education system with so many people from stunted cultures and not expect a falloff in test scores. All people are created equal, and should have equal rights but don't expect thinking people to buy into the lie that all cultures are equal.
Thomas Sowell has pointed out that the number of high scorers (700 and above and 750 and above) dropped in absolute terms in the 90s. That was probably one motivation for the recentering. They took out the analogies because with the analogies the verbal test was substantially an IQ test, and the President of UC Berkeley was not only outraged that a test might show that there are IQ differences, he threatened to discontinue use of the SAT. That would have led to a major revenue loss for the SAT folks (partly because other leftist college presidents would have followed suit), so they changed the test. There is a lot that is being concealed.
Still, we send our children to government schools by the 10s of millions because, drum roll please: Our schools are different!
Next, let us look at the people who trained the managers [University & College Education Departments], should they not be held to metrics that their students failures should reflect back to them? If not, why not?
What we are seeing is a pervasive failure of an entire VITAL SECTOR of our civilization. Children are not being taught and that spells FAIL for the succeeding generations. Yet we have entrenched political machinery, unions and compliant parents who are willing to have government destroy our children on the alters of FAIRNESS & FEELINGS!
ping
Changing demographics due to immigration, legal and illegal. By 2019, half of the children 18 and under will be minorities as defined by the USG. At least this article recognizes the cause. It makes one wonder how this country will remain competitive in the global economy. Note the jump in the percentage of students with other than English as their first language. Yet, we are told that illegal immigration is declining. And I wonder how many students would be able to take advantage of the Dream Act.
I'll have to start posting more quotes within quotes.
-PJ
The College Board, which released the scores Wednesday, said the results reflect the record number of students from the high school class of 2011 who took the exam and the growing diversity of the test-taking pool -- particularly Hispanics. As more students aim for college and take the exam, it tends to drag down average scores.
Roughly 27 percent of the 1.65 million test-takers last year had a first language other than English, up from 19 percent just a decade ago.
When you have more than a quarter of the students taking the test with other than English as their first language, does anyone think that reading scores would be unaffected. And note that in just a decade the percentage has gone from 19% to 27%.
Fascinating. I didn’t remember the details about the elimination of analogies, only that it had to do with racism.
My children (8, so far, of “school age”) have one year of public schooling completed, and that was Anoreth’s year of community college while she waited to turn 18 and join the Coast Guard.
My Tom’s debate coach had planned to have his children attend a public high school - the best in our city - but after a couple of years of judging debate, he concluded that the academic level of the top public school students in the Carolinas was below what he could achieve with homeschooling, and that the values and worldview being taught were even worse than he had imagined they might face.
Gang-sign interpreters should be on hand from a remote monitoring location. The same test in Spanish must be given to all students. That should even things up a bit.
They can demonstrate a statistical correlation, but that doesn’t prove causation. Many students from Spanish-speaking households have been in US public schools since kindergarten. If they’re not competent in English, what have the schools been doing all that time?
I went to high school in the 80s with students from China and India who had been in the US a much shorter time, and they developed English competency to a high level, starting from native languages much more different from English than Spanish is. I was competing in spelling and English competitions with students from India and Korea, just like so many of the contest winners today.
They’d have a much better chance of making the case that the culture of most Latin American immigrants - like the culture of most American black people - is less conducive to intellectual achievements than some other cultures ... but that would open a can of worms that liberal don’t want opened.
There is no excuse for this. My over the top dyslexic son (three types of dyslexia) got a 750 in the reading and a 790 on the math this year (April or May test ... I can’t remember). He also got a 760 in writing. Their standards are way too low.
I’d hesitate to generalize like that. I think there are schools where the most motivated students can get a good primary/secondary education, without excessive risk of injury, if they get lucky ... but that’s not a judgment about the school as a whole. I got an education at public school that produced a 1530 SAT and a National Merit Scholarship and national English awards ... but I also got an “education” that made me vow no child of mine would ever attend a public school while I live, and I don’t say that lightly.
I’ve told my older children that if they can persuade their father and me that there would be some immense academic or artistic advantage to their attending school - to which the child would commit 100% - then we will allocate the money for the very nice Southern Baptist school not far from home ... but they will not go to our county schools.
Mr. Walker’s family moved to a new house in order to be in the area for a particular high school, but by the time their oldest child reached 8th grade, the school had cut the top academic programs because of the district’s focus on attempting to raise the achievement levels of the lowest-performing students. No doubt the district would agree (if a few top administrators were spiffled) that parents of intelligent and motivated students can just do a better job themselves. (They still don’t regret the move, because it put them in walking distance of their church ;-).
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