A Call for Books and Less TV

Prompting a call for students to read more and watch rock videos less, national average scores of high schools seniors in the verbal portion of the Scholastic Aptitude Test declined slightly in 1990, for the fourth year in a row. Meanwhile, the average math score did not change.

The two main parts of the SAT are scored on a scale of 200 to 800. This year’s three-point drop in verbal SAT scores, to 424, puts that average back to its lowest in two decades, compared to 463 in 1969. The 476 average in math has not changed over four years and remains 17 points below the 1969 average, although it is 10 points better than 1980, which had the worst average in 20 years.

“Disturbing but not particularly surprising,” was the way Donald M. Steward, president of the College Board, which sponsors the SAT, described the 1990 national verbal scores. In a statement accompanying the scores’ release recently, Steward refered to a recent study that showed high school seniors on the average spend at least three hours a day watching television and read 10 or fewer pages of any written material.

“Students must pay less attention to video games and music videos and begin to read more,” Steward said. “Reading is in danger of becoming a lost art among too many American students--and that would be a national tragedy.”

California’s 1990 averages on the nation’s most widely used college admissions examination were 419 in verbal, down three points from last year, and 484 in math, unchanged from 1989.

Verbal scores in Orange County ranged from an average of 348 in the Santa Ana Unified School District to 457 in the Newport-Mesa Unified School District. In math, average scores in the county ranged from 449 in Santa Ana to 543 in the Irvine Unified School District.

In districts where the average verbal score fell below the state average, officials attributed the lower scores to an increasing number of seniors who speak English as a second language.

The percentage of nonwhites among SAT-takers this year in California was 49%, up from 35% in 1984 and sharply higher than this year’s national nonwhite representation of 27%. Although they have increased their scores significantly in the last 15 years, minority groups generally do worse on the SAT than Anglos, except for Asian-Americans on math.

Yet despite that ethnic representation, California students were only five points below the national verbal average. Californians scored eight points above the national math average, boosted partly by the Asian representation--22% of California SAT-takers, compared to 8% nationally.

Critics allege that biases built into the test cause score gaps between men and women and between Anglos and most minorities. But the College Board says those differences are caused by educational and economic backgrounds of students and their parents.

“You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him float.”--Unknown