A record-high number of college-bound seniors flocked to their designated testing site to take the nation’s most widely administered standardized college admissions test this year. Other than gaining a greater number of test takers, nothing change d much.
Although the number of students taking the SAT reached a record 1.5 million this year, the average student performance for all three portions of the test paralleled those of 2007, according to the College Board’s 2008 report
The class of 2008’s average scores for the critical reading, mathematics and writing sections remained the same at 502, 515 and 494, respectively, where potential scores for each section of the standardized test range from 200 to 800.
In critical reading the performance gap between males and females was 4 points, male test takers outscored females by 33 points in mathematics and the average score for females in writing was 13 points higher than males.
The number of first-generation test takers was 35 percent, whereas in 2007 36 percent of seniors reported they were first -generation test takers.
While performance gaps typically peak between blacks and whites, the largest performance gap among this year’s test takers presented itself between the education level of their parents, which was a 387 point difference.
Of the 1.5 million students taking the test, 25 percent, or roughly 321,700, reported the highest level of their parents’ education was a graduate degree while 5 percent, slightly more than 61,000, reported their parents did not receive a high school diploma.
The student performance gap between blacks and whites was 287 points and the gap between students with family income between $0 to $20,000 and those who reported a family income of more than $200,000 was 356 points.
