WASHINGTON ― No score results yet, but students didn’t seem to be scared off by the new version of the SAT college entrance exam.
The College Board, the nonprofit organization that owns the SAT, said Tuesday that nearly 1.4 million high schoolers took the newly redesigned SAT between March and June of this year. The board says that’s up about 180,000 test takers over the same period last spring.
The new version of the test ― with more of a focus on real-world vocabulary and learning ― debuted in March. Some college advisers were a little cautious about encouraging students to take the debut test since it had a new format and wasn’t as familiar to students.
The College Board says it won’t release average score results for the new SAT until next fall when it has a full year of data on graduating seniors for the 2016-2017 school year. The board says most 2016 graduating seniors, 90 percent, took the old SAT before its final run earlier this year.
In the report released Tuesday, average scores for the 2016 class of seniors for the old SAT exam showed slight declines across all sections. The scores for graduating 2016 seniors were only reported through January of this year, when the old version of the SAT was last administered.
For seniors, the mean reading score was 494 out of 800 possible points. That compares to a mean score of 497 for the class of 2015, over the same period of time, through January 2015.
Math showed another slight dip. The mean score was 508 for the 2016 senior class, compared to 512 in the previous year.
