Here’s the headline and lead paragraph from today’s front page Washington Post story (emphasis mine):

SAT reading scores drop to lowest point in decades

SAT reading scores for graduating high school seniors this year reached the lowest point in nearly four decades, reflecting a steady decline in performance in that subject on the college admissions test, the College BoContinue Reading »

50 years ago Monday the California Legislature signed into law the 1960 California Master Plan for Higher Education. In honor of the anniversary of this seminal document, I’ll be doing a series of posts on important Plan elements, starting yesterday with a brief history.

Blame the Baby Boom generation and the 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education in California for the widespread use of Continue Reading »

Matthew K. Tabor takes to his blog to write an impassioned response to a piece I wrote, backed up by over 250,000 student records on the class of 1999, arguing the SAT and ACT mattered little in college admissions. His evidence? He The New York Daily News found a student who gasp! graduated high school unprepared for college.

Like Tabor, I was skeptical of the ability of a college to estContinue Reading »

A growing number of top liberal arts colleges, dissatisfied with the SAT, the reliance on a standardized test in admission decisions, and the college rankings culture that feeds it, have opted to make college entrance exams optional. Anyone who’s studied statistics or human behavior could predict the outcome: students with less than stellar SAT scores will opt not to submit them, while thContinue Reading »

Wake Forest University is hosting a conference this week on making the SAT optional for admission, and they invited Daniel Golden to headline. Golden, author of a book called The Price of Admission that documents all the ways children of wealth and privilege are favored in college admissions, was an interesting choice to headline this conference, because he’s actually ambivalent about theContinue Reading »

Colleges and universities distinguish themselves from one another in lots of different ways– scholarly reknown, the size of the endowment, success on the athletic fields, etc. But the most commonly-used measure is probably the “quality” of the freshman class, as measured by standardized tests like the SAT and ACT. Average incoming SAT scores at University of Texas campuses, foContinue Reading »

There’s been fair amount of discussion and derision over Baylor University’s decision to pay already-admitted freshmen to retake the SAT. What’s been less prevalent is an analysis of what they paid and what they got for their money. Here’s what they paid:

- 861 students retook the SAT and earned $300 bookstore credits. Cost: $258,300 - 150 students raised their scContinue Reading »

In a move that raises the cynicism and gamemanship bar for college and universities across the land, Baylor University is paying freshmen it has already admitted $300 to re-take the SAT and giving them an additional $1,000 “merit” scholarship if they bump their scores up by 50 points or more. Then it reports their higher scores to U.S. News & World Report, helping Baylor reach iContinue Reading »

ETS released a new research report on teacher quality last week showing that the teacher pool seems to be improving, at least on academic measures. The researchers compared the 1994-1997 and 2002-2005 Praxis test takers and found that the SAT scores and GPAs of teacher candidates have increased from one cohort to the next. Why? They credit a combination of policies, both federal and state, inclContinue Reading »

On the front page of the Washington Post today, there’s an article about racial achievement gaps in SAT scores at local “high performing” high schools. The gist of the article is that high overall SAT scores at some high schools hide the fact that average scores for African American students at these schools are much lower. This is precisely why NCLB requires data to be disaggregated by subgrouContinue Reading »