Advance by Latinos Paces Best SAT Gains in 22 Years

Led by a strong upsurge by Mexican-American and Puerto Rican students, average Scholastic Aptitude Test scores posted their biggest gains in 22 years, the College Board announced today.

Average combined math and verbal SAT scores in 1985 rose nine points to 906--the largest year-to-year climb since 1963, when scores rose nine points before beginning a 22-year slide.

College Board President George H. Hanford said at a news conference that scores for the Class of 1985 rose five points on the verbal SAT to 431 and four points in math to 475.

SAT averages had leveled and turned up slightly in the past several years, but the gain in 1985 was the first that could be considered a decisive upturn.

The SAT score advance was tipped Friday by Secretary of Education William J. Bennett, but the College Board announcement today provided important details.

“There’s still more good news,” Hanford said. “All minority groups showed improvements on the SAT in 1985, and nearly all states had increases in their average scores.

“There was also a continued rise in the percentage of ‘high scorers’--those students who score over 600 on either part of the SAT. Nearly 77,000 students did so on the verbal half of the SAT and 167,000 on the math section.”

Puerto Rican youngsters showed the biggest year-to-year gains, up 10 points in verbal to a 368 average and up six points to 428 on the math. Mexican-Americans gained six points on both math and verbal scores, averaging 426 and 382 respectively.

Black students gained four points to 346 on the verbal and three points to 376 on the math, while white youngsters as a group rose four points on both math (491) and verbal (449). Both groups thus trailed the average nationwide SAT gain.

Fewer Black Students

The percentage of minority students taking the SAT rose to an all-time high of 20% this year, Hanford said, “but unfortunately the percentage of blacks taking the test went down. In 1985, 8.9% of our test-takers were black, compared to 9.1% in 1984.” That translates to 2,000 fewer blacks aiming for college, a trend Hanford called “disturbing.”

Hanford said the public should be encouraged by the turnaround in SAT scores and other signs that American high schools are getting tougher.

“But it is also clear that we have no grounds for being complacent about the state of education in this country. Despite the gains of the past few years, we are yet a combined total of 74 points behind the scores of 1963, the last high point in this SAT saga. We still have a long way to go.”

The College Board sponsors the college entrance test taken by about a million high school seniors.

tougher.

The SAT is scored on a scale of 200 to 800, with a combined math-verbal score of 1,600 being a perfect score. The test is an entrance requirement at virtually all the nation’s selective colleges and universities.

Scores bottomed out at 424 in the verbal section and 466 in math in 1980 and showed little change until last year, when average math scores rose three points and verbal results gained a point.