Oregon SAT scores show weaker math, writing skills

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(Anna Marum / The Oregonian / 2014)

Oregon students' performance on the SAT college entrance exam indicated the class of 2016 left high school less prepared in math and less capable as writers than perhaps any class that came before them.

The average reading score on the exam was flat. But the math score dropped three points, to 515 among public high school graduates, while the average in writing fell four points to 495, College Board officials said.

Those seemingly dismal results should be taken with a grain of salt, however, because the SAT is taken by a self-selected subset of Oregon high school graduates, not by a representative sample. It is also unclear how the end of the traditional SAT -- given for a final time in January before a revised "new SAT" was rolled out in March -- may have affected students' decisions about whether and when to take the exam.

Results of the new SAT have not yet been made public. The average scores for the class of 2016, and the scores for the class of 2015 to which they were compared, only include scores for students who took the SAT by January of their senior year.

Overall, the number of students who took the SAT by that deadline in the class of 2016 was virtually identical to the number in the previous graduating class: slightly more than 16,700. A competing exam, the ACT, drew 14,700 takers.

Those ACT results suggested Oregon's class of 2016 was the best-prepared for college in recent history, with 4 percent more of them demonstrating college readiness in math than their predecessors and 3 percent more scoring college-ready across all subjects tested.

Why the opposite findings by the two similar tests? No one knows for sure, but the ACT results are skewed by the heavy participation of students in a few large districts, including Portland Public Schools, Beaverton and Tigard-Tualatin, in which all juniors are given the ACT for free on a school day.

Oregon's class of 2016 was the first that prepared for and took tests aligned to Common Core standards, which were supposed to equip them with better logic and writing skills. As juniors, however, Oregon's class of 2016 performed particularly poorly against the Common Core math standards.

And 15 percent of Oregon's SAT-takers exhibited extremely poor writing skills, earning fewer than 400 points, on a scale of 200 to 800, on the exam's writing section.

Both the SAT and the ACT have been shown, in combination with high school grades, to do a better job predicting students' performance during their freshman year of college than high school grades alone.

Nationally, average SAT scores fell even more steeply than they did in Oregon. The average reading score declined three points to 494, math fell four points to 508 and writing declined five points to 482. All three sections are graded on the 200-to-800-point scale.

The erosion in Oregon students' SAT performance contrasts with the portrait the state's SAT-takers painted of themselves. More than 50 percent reported their grade-point average in the A-range, with 40 percent saying they ranked in the Top 10 percent of their class. Officials at the College Board said that represents a massive case of grade inflation nationwide since the class of 2008 left high school.

Seventy-seven percent of Oregon SAT-takers said they took four or more years of math in high school, typically through calculus or pre-calculus. Two-thirds said one or both of their parents are college graduates. More than one-third reported their family's income exceeds $100,000. Eighty-six percent said they aim to earn a college degree, while the remainder said they were undecided.

As was the case with ACT scores, the most popular college choice among Oregon's SAT-takers was Oregon State University. Almost half had their scores sent to Oregon State to be considered for admission.

Makers of the new SAT reported that lots of students took it and that they and their teachers think it's a big improvement. But they did not provide any results or any state-specific participation figures. The ACT has been growing in popularity in Oregon.

-- Betsy Hammond

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