It may say more about the state of our system of education than about the test.
I find the title of your post interesting:
"SAT Scores See Biggest Decline Since 1975"
Then two posts later is the following title:
"Home-schooled students successful at A&M"
Do I need to comment further?
This is a great way to improve affirmative action. All of a sudden, test results appear not valid enough to be considered for admission. "There must be something wrong with this year's test so we'll just have to look for other factors to admit this year's freshman class."
Test is sexist...
Males should have their score automatically increased by 11 points to make up for historical disadvantage.....
I would like to see the SAT scores graphed against rap sales.
I couldn't access the original article to see if it had more details, but I would offer several possible explanations.
1) Kids are getting dumber. (I don't really think this is the case. I include it for the sake of completeness and because most people, out of PC-ness, refuse to consider the most obvious explanation.)
2) Quality of education is dropping. (I strongly believe this is true.)
3) The test is too darn long and the exhaustion factor causes scores to drop. (A good possibility.)
4) Many more kids are taking the test. (Highly likely. I think far more kids are encouraged to take it than in the past. If the test used to be taken primarily by college-bound A and B students, but is now being taken by a lot of C students, then the average scores are sure to drop.)
5) The test is faulty. (Actually, I'd bet that all the test tinkering would be more likely to raise scores. They have eliminated the analogies and a lot of the tougher questions, although in some areas, I think they claim to have added a higher degree of difficulty.)
6) The change in average scores is not statistically significant. (I'd have to have a lot more data to judge this.)
Guess it's time to "renorm" them.
And, who's fault is it?
It appears that the lavishly-funded Bush/Kennedy "No Child Left Behind" program has failed. What a surprise for the Bushbots!
I've got a cousin who's got two children: A son and a daughter, one year apart. About 4 1/2 years ago, the son took the SATs, and aced it, a perfect store. He graduated from Stanford, and I believe he's going to be starting at the Stanford medical school this term.
His younger sister took the SATs the following year, and she aced it too! She'll be graduating from University of PA at the end of this year. I think that she's looking at going to Georgetown for her grad school.
I can't believe I'm related to kids that smart!
Mark
I tuk the SAT tess 3 times my first senur yer.
I tuk it agan 4 times my sekund senur yer.
Now, how many times do I haf to tak this dam tes?? Yu wood think that 5 times is mor then enuf!!!!
If you take into account that they have dumbed down the test, they scores have really fallen.
Some guesses off the top of my head:
1. Four hours is a long time to be sitting in a room with a number two pencil and a bubble sheet.
2. Many students don't read a lot any more. I teach some bright male students who can read well enough, as long the reading consists of cheats for video games and short articles in Maxim or GQ. Most of my female students read more than the males since they're e-mailing all the time. None of them, however, read newspapers. A few read novels. A lot of them, both male and female, read the Internet, which is often fragmented and presented in tiny bits.
3. A lot of the standards that we used to have back when I was child in the late Stone Age (circa 1965) have vanished. I know teachers who smile and brag that they can't spell. Grammar lessons are scattered in the curriculum; it used to be the main subject of learning. Proper diction, smooth prose, and elegant style are virtually ignored in the modern English class and rarely imposed on a student, unless it is part of a lesson about an author or a specific book.
4. Just observing my society over the years I've noticed a decline in clarity as more and more of us adopt legalese as a our "main mode of communication" (speaking). At the same time, comedy has devolved from wit and banter (Newhart, Tom Lehrer, the Marx Brothers) into crudity and grossness ("American Pie," Larry the Cable Guy). You have to understand something about language to catch the jokes in a Marx Brothers movie; shouting a vulgarism followed by a fart doesn't require much verbal understanding.
5. Compare the lyrics of Motown to the lyrics of a rap artists.
6. And let me tell you about the science teacher who once told me with some apparent pride that "I don't read books."
So those are some ideas. Overall, it doesn't surprise me that the reading scores of today's students would decline.
My two cents worth.
The test is sexist and doesn't have enough essays about cars and sports.
We need mo money to ficks edookashun. Den it be all bettor.
I would bet that half the English majors today could pass this test.
http://www.okcupid.com/tests/take?testid=14457200288064322170
Political Correctness has evidently dumbed down everybody.
On the one hand we are told that Latino illegal immigrants total 12 million people and this huge number doesn't even include their US citizen offspring. Then we are told that these folks don't fare too well in our education system.
Now I see that the brightest people in the our country can't see why our educational stats are down.
Kinda stupid to inject millions of people who don't excell in education into our schools then wonder why average performance stats are down.