Washington
The College Board released the profile of the 1998
college freshmen who took SAT and AP (Advanced Placement) exams, saying
that the number of well-prepared students of all ethnicities is
increasing — as well as the number of poorly prepared students.
The stark contrast led Dr. Donald Stewart, head of the College Board, to decry the “widening gap in preparation.”
More than one million of today’s freshmen took the SAT and they
took more than one million AP tests, so the data collected from those
students allows an intimate look at the high school preparation of a
huge cohort of students. The SAT and AP are used by many of the
selective colleges in the country as a way to sort through applications
for admissions.
Almost 20 percent more African Americans took the SAT in 1998 than
in 1988 — and the number of Mexican Americans almost doubled during
those ten years. But while there was a slight rise in the average math
scores for population as a whole, for those two groups.
Although The College Board cautions against using its data as a
surrogate for school accountability, the SAT is widely used as a
measure of school performance, and average scores are eagerly studied
to give some idea of where the nation stands educationally.
The most striking differences the College Board found in average
SAT scores was between suburban schools and schools in both urban and
rural areas. Suburban schools logged in average scores that were 15 to
20 twenty points above the average, whereas urban and rural schools had
average scores that were between 9 and 17 points below the average.
