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Education Week--SAT Results 2016: It's Complicated
So you'd like to find out how well the class of 2016 scored on the SAT, you say? Well, have fun with that.
Normally at this time of year, we report the scores and trends for the college-admissions exam. But this is a weird year, a year so full of disclaimers, caveats, and partial cohorts that it makes it pretty tough to tell you anything at all. That's because some students took the newly redesigned SAT (March 2016 and later), and the lion's share of them took the old one (January 2016 and earlier). The College Board's report is here.
So we're gonna walk through this nice and calm-like, taking occasional deep breaths along the way. Because you're gonna need them. You're gonna feel frustrated. You've got lots of company.
SAT performance:
We've got median scores only for the old SAT, and they show a slight drop across the board. The College Board says that since there were only three administrations of the new SAT, releasing scores would not fully represent the characteristics and performance of a complete, typical cohort. We won't know how students are performing on the new SAT until this time next year, although many anecdotal reports already show many are getting higher scores, albeit on a different scale.
Like a Facebook relationship status, it's complicated. The College Board divvied up the numbers into several chunks, making it impossible to compare participation for the entire graduating class of 2016 to classes from earlier years. (Don't say I didn't warn you!)
New SAT only: In the first three administrations of the new exam, in March, May, and June, 1.36 million students took the test. That's 180,000 more than the number who took the old SAT during the same three months in 2015: 1.18 million. (These numbers include students from any graduating class, not just the class of 2016.)
New and old SAT combined: These numbers show how many students in the 2016 graduating class took any form of the SAT, new or old, through June 2016: 1.68 million. (The College Board got the 25,600 year-to-year increase by revising the 2015 data. More on that in a second.)
Old SAT only: These figures show that more students in the class of 2016 took the old SAT through January 2016 than did so during the same period in 2015. The looming changeover to the new SAT might have encouraged a last-minute rush.
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/high_school_and_beyond/2016/09/SAT_results_2016.html
By Catherine Gewertz on September 27, 2016 12:01 AM |
Washington Post--‘Brain-hostile’ education: how schools are failing adolescents
Schools too often ignore how the brains of middle and high school students develop.
Valerie Strauss|September 26 2016
