2002 SAT Scores Higher in Math, Lower in Verbal

The high school graduating class of 2002 scored slightly higher in math but lower in verbal skills than last year’s class on the SAT college entrance exam, the College Board reported Tuesday.

College Board President Gaston Caperton applauded students for their improved math performance, noting that the average score rose two points this year to 516--its highest level since 1969. He attributed the gain to students taking more rigorous math courses.

But scores on the verbal part of the high-stakes test taken by 1.3 million high school students have stalled in recent years, and dipped two points this year to 504. Caperton urged U.S. high schools, parents and students to place renewed emphasis on reading, composition and grammar.

“As a nation, we need to focus on helping students improve their reading and writing skills,” he said at a Washington news conference.

The College Board, which owns the SAT, announced in June that it will add a writing test to the exam beginning in March 2005. The move was propelled in part by the University of California, the SAT’s biggest client, which had threatened to scrap the test in favor of developing one of its own.

The SAT’s testing rival, the ACT, announced this week that it also will offer an essay on its exam starting in 2004.

Students don’t read as much or as deeply in high school as they used to, several educators said.

“What we have now is a population that is very responsive to imagery, but losing its capacity to use and respond to words,” said Carol Muske-Dukes, a USC English professor who directs the university’s graduate writing program. “When you lose the capacity to read deeply, you lose the capacity to think.”

In other trends, female students this year narrowed the gap between their overall scores and those of male students, but only slightly. Males outscored females by 39 points on the combined verbal and math portions of the SAT, down from 42 points last year. Math scores accounted for most of the difference, as in previous years.

Critics said the persistent gap should raise questions about the fairness of the test, which is used by the majority of the nation’s top colleges and universities as a criterion for admission.

“It just galls me that a test that purports to predict how students will perform in college continues to show that women do worse even though they do so much better in college,” said Paul Kanarek, who heads the Orange County office of the Princeton Review, which prepares students for the SAT.

Female students, he and others noted, get better grades than men in high school and college and should thus outperform them on the SAT and other exams.

College Board researchers say, though, that the gap may be because a greater proportion and range of female students take the test. Women account for about 54% of test-takers.

Nationwide, men averaged 507 points for the verbal section this year while women scored 502. In math, male students scored an average of 534 points and women scored 500--the highest average for female students in 35 years.

Still larger gaps existed between the scores of white students and most minority groups, as they have in the past. Ethnic minorities made up 35% of the students who took the test this year, the largest proportion in history, officials said.

Black students nationwide scored an average of 203 points lower than non-Latino whites on the combined math and verbal SAT, worse than last year’s 201. Mexican Americans scored an average of 157 points below non-Latino whites, versus 151 points in 2001.

As in previous years, Asian Americans outperformed all other groups on the math section of the SAT.

In California, the percentage of college-bound students taking the test rose to a record 52% this year, compared with 46% of students nationwide. Participation among minority students in California also increased this year, officials said.

Overall, California students scored 496 on the verbal section, eight points below the national average, and 517 on the math, a point above the national average.

The SAT report follows by one week the results released for the ACT, which showed that the national average composite score fell slightly this year, the first decline in five years.

The average among students in the 2002 graduating class was 20.8 out of a possible 36, down from 21.0 in each of the last five years.

In California, however, the average score held steady at 21.4 for the third straight year.

Only about 40,000 students take the ACT in California, about one-sixth of the number that take the SAT.

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Times staff writer Stuart Silverstein contributed to this report.