Question of the Month -April 2004

Q:        How do Southern states stack up on the SAT?

A:        The Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), administered by The College Board in Princeton, New Jersey is a three-hour test measuring verbal and mathematical reasoning skills.  Student test scores are used as one indicator by many colleges and universities to determine a candidate for enrollment’s readiness to pursue college-level work.  The SAT is scored on a scale of 200-800 for each part (Verbal and Math), with the two scores added together for a student’s total score. 

College-bound students in east of the Mississippi River have historically taken the SAT, with those west of the Mississippi River taking the ACT, a similar assessment preferred by colleges in the West.  The SAT has increased its profile of student participation over the past two decades, with 80 percent of colleges without open-enrollment policies now accepting SAT scores as part of their application process.    

Testing patterns offer interesting comparisons across the region.  Participation rates in a nine of the 16 SLC member states are below 20 percent of students.  Nationally, 48 percent of the 2.94 million high school graduates in the country took the SAT.  The impact on low participation rates is often to inflate the scores for the state, since the smaller sample of students is often seeking admission to colleges out-of-state or at more competitive institutions.  Table 1 provides SAT participation rates, total participation, and scores for the SLC region. 

Table 1:  SAT Participation and Results in the SLC States

Source:  The College Board, College-Bound Seniors 2003 State Reports.

The remarkable jump in participation between West Virginia, with a participation rate of 20 percent, and Texas, with a participation rate of 57, also marks a drop of 39 points in performance.  Indeed, what is perhaps most remarkable in table 1 is the high performance of Virginia, North Carolina and Maryland, which have participation rates of more than two-thirds and composite scores above 1,000. 

Table 1 also provides a snapshot of an interesting phenomenon:  Girls have consistently posted higher participation rates than boys for several years.  The only state where more boys participate in the SAT than girls in the South is Missouri, and that only by 8 test takers.  In the region and nationally, girls account for 54 percent of all SAT test takers.

SAT participation varies considerably by race and ethnicity as well, as demonstrated by table 2.  In some instances, this indicates the varied ethnic diversity of the state, with West Virginia and Arkansas having proportionately larger non-minority populations than in much of the region.  It also may indicate lower college-bound rates among minority students.  An historical note not provided by table 2 is the consistent rise in minority participation in the SAT over the past decade, as reported by The College Board.  Minority participation in the SAT has risen nationally from 30 percent in 1993 to 36 percent in 2003, an indication of higher levels of college-bound minority students. 

Table 2:  SAT Participation by Ethnicity