Testing, Testing

SAT scores on the rise

There was mild optimism two years ago, when scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Test crept up a notch. Now the optimism has risen to a higher pitch: SAT averages for last June's crop of high school seniors made their largest combined gain since 1963. That was the year the scores began a decline lasting nearly two decades. Out of a possible 800, math results climbed by 3 points, to 471; verbal averages were up by 1, to 426. Says George Hanford, president of the College Entrance Examination Board, which sponsors the test: "We seem to have turned the corner in seeking to improve American education."

About 1 million college-bound high school seniors--one-third of the class of '84--took the SAT exam last year. The test is designed to predict how students will perform in college. But each year's results have come to be scrutinized as a signal of how U.S. high schools are going. The plunge from 1963 (when the verbal average was 478, the math average 502) to 1980 and '81 (when they bottomed out at 424 verbal and 466 math) was attributed to social factors, softening ,-- academic standards and deteriorating schools.

This year's results, suggests Hanford, say that students "have grown up under a different set of circumstances, that their society was more interested in education." According to Chester Finn, professor of education and public policy at Vanderbilt University, the upturn can also be linked to a renewed stress on the fundamentals. The knowledge measured by the SATs, he says, "is the very kind that has been the object of the so-called back-to-basics movement for the past six to eight years."

Finn objects, however, to emphasizing the SAT as a measure of how much students are learning in school. "It's only supposed to measure the kid's ability to do college-level work," he points out. "That has at least as much to do with the brains you were born with and the educational environment you get at home." Cautions Fred Jewett, acting dean of admissions at Harvard University: "It is too early to say that the battle has been won."

Whatever their full significance, rising scores are preferable to falling ones.

This year high school girls chalked up the most notable average increase--a 4-point jump in math, perhaps a result of increased concentration on math and science study. Moreover, at a time when the quality of America's teachers has raised concern, more students indicated a career interest in education, and their scores climbed more sharply than those of students generally. Potential educators had verbal averages of 398, up 4 points, and their math scores were 425, up 7.