SAT Scores Unchanged From Last Year

High school seniors in the class of 1986 averaged no better on the Scholastic Aptitude Test than students a year earlier, the College Board reported.

The average combined score on the two-part exam was 906--475 on the math section, 431 on the verbal--unchanged from the previous year, the board reported today. The test is scored on a scale of 200 to 800, with 1600 being a perfect combined score.

The leveling off of average scores in 1986 followed a record nine-point combined gain a year earlier.

The big 1985 gain, along with modest increases since 1980, when SAT scores sank to a historic low of 890, had been widely hailed as evidence that education reform efforts were starting to pay off in better student performance.

Before that, the 17-year plunge from a peak of 980 in 1963 to the 1980 low was regarded as proof of the decline of the nation’s schools.

In California, the average scores of students taking the test this year were 423 verbal and 481 math, nearly unchanged from last year’s scores of 424 verbal and 480 math.

Slight ACT Gain

Meanwhile, the American College Testing Program in Iowa City, Iowa, which sponsors the rival ACT college admissions exam, reported that the approximately 1 million students taking that test improved their average composite score by 0.2 to 18.8, the highest level in a decade. The four-part exam, scored on a scale of 1 to 35, is the predominant test in 28 states, mostly in the West and Midwest. ACT President Oluf M. Davidsen attributed the improvement to stiffer high school graduation requirements being enacted in many states.

To the dismay of many educators, the SAT has achieved a statistical majesty similar to the Dow Jones industrial average, which measures daily stock market activity, or the gross national product, which gauges the nation’s economic vitality. The public tends to regard the SAT as a single number capable of summing up the health, or lack of it, of the nation’s schools.

College Board President George H. Hanford cautioned in an interview against reading too much into a one-year pause in the SAT’s upward progress.

“One year’s results aren’t significant. What is significant is what happens over time. Last year’s increases were pretty good. What is significant is that scores haven’t gone down in a while,” he said.

South Dakota, where only 3% of seniors take the test, posted the highest average combined score of 1098--567 math, 531 verbal. South Carolina had the lowest average--431 math, 395 verbal--but 49% took the exam.

The U.S. Department of Education has used SATs in annual state-by-state comparisons of educational quality. But others, including the College Board, have cautioned against such comparisons.

Mississippi’s schools, for example, rank last, or nearly so, by almost any measure among the 50 states, yet the state has a 1001 SAT average. But only 3% of high school seniors in that state take the test, mostly the highest achievers applying to selective colleges that require the SAT for admission.

By contrast, New Jersey’s SAT average is 889, more than 100 points below Mississippi’s. But 65% of New Jersey’s seniors, with a much wider range of academic ability, take the test.

The number of college-bound seniors taking the SAT in 1986 rose by 2.3% to slightly more than 1 million, or more than two-fifths of all 1986 high school graduates and two-thirds of those entering college after graduation, the board reported.

This year’s report omitted how various racial and ethnic groups performed, because the student questionnaires that collect that information were being redesigned this year. In recent years, those figures had shown that blacks, Latinos and American Indians had improved but still lagged far behind white students.

In 1985, the board reported that blacks scored an average combined 722, 184 points below the national average of 906. Whites scored an average combined 940, or 34 points above average.

The College Board, which has sponsored the SAT since the test was first administered 60 years ago, is a private, nonprofit organization representing about 2,500 colleges and other institutions of learning.