Kentucky Students Improve on A.P. Tests

This from Ryan Alessi at the Herald-Leader:

But trail the national average

Kentucky is tied for 31st in the percentage of students who passed at least one advance-placement exam in high school last year, according to the College Board's annual report.

Ten percent of public high school students in Kentucky and Indiana scored at least a 3 on an A.P. exam in 2008, which was below the national average of 15.2 percent. But that's steady improvement for Kentucky since 2003, when 7 percent of students passed at least one A.P. exam...

Blacks Less Likely to Take A.P. Exam

This form the New York Times:

More than 15 percent of the three million students who graduated from public high schools last year passed at least one Advanced Placement exam, the College Board said Wednesday, but African-American students were still far less likely to have passed, or to even have taken, an A.P. exam than white, Hispanic or Asian students.

In its fifth annual report on its A.P. program, the College Board said the program was growing steadily. More than 460,000 students, or 15.2 percent, passed an A.P. exam last year, compared with 14.1 percent in 2007 and 12.2 percent five years ago.

But the program is not spreading evenly across the nation. In Mississippi and Louisiana, fewer than 4 percent of high school graduates passed an A.P. exam last year, and in 17 other states, fewer than 10 percent passed one...

Scores Stable as More Minorities Take SAT

This from the Washington Post:

SAT performance held steady for 2008 high school graduates even as participation rose among minority students and those who are part of the first generation in their families to go to college, the College Board reported yesterday...

...Nationwide, the number of students taking the SAT surpassed 1.5 million for the first time, up 8 percent from five years ago and almost 30 percent over the past decade. Forty percent of test-takers were minority students, up from 39 percent last year, and 36 percent were among a group described as first-generation collegegoers, up from 35 percent.

College Board officials considered the boost in participation evidence that the high school students who aspire to a college degree are growing more ethnically and economically diverse.

Gaston Caperton, president of the College Board, a nonprofit organization based in New York, said the pool of test-takers "more than ever . . . reflects the face of education in this country."

"It's essential that all students strive to attend college -- and then succeed in their classes and, ultimately, graduate. We're gratified to see that our country is moving increasingly toward being a nation of college graduates," he said.

Some educators, policymakers and others concerned about high school quality saw the consistency in scores from last year as a bright spot. Scores on standardized exams often dip when the number of test-takers increases.

Education experts said that recent efforts to improve the quality of high school courses and expand academic options, to ensure that students are ready for college, are possibly starting to take hold.

"Some of these kids wouldn't have taken the SAT just a few years ago. They wouldn't have wanted to. They wouldn't have been encouraged to. And both are changing," said former West Virginia governor Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education, a group seeking to improve high schools. "I also take it as a challenge. It's not fair to build the expectation level and not be able to deliver on the quality of education." ...

Study Finds Little Benefit in New SAT

This from the New York Times:

The revamped SAT, expanded three years ago to include a writing test, predicts college success no better than the old test, and not quite as well as a student’s high school grades, according to studies released Tuesday by the College Board, which owns the test.

“The changes made to the SAT did not substantially change how predictive the test is of first-year college performance,” the studies said.

College Board officials presented their findings as “important and positive” confirmation of the test’s success.

“The SAT continues to be an excellent predictor of how students will perform,” said Laurence Bunin, senior vice president of operations at the board, and general manager of the SAT program. “The 3-hour, 45-minutes test is almost as good a predictor as four years of high school grades, and a better predictor for minority students.”

But critics of the new test say that if that is the best it can do, the extra time, expense and stress on students are not worth it.

“The new SAT was supposed to be significantly better and fairer than the old one, but it is neither,” said Robert Schaeffer, the public education director at FairTest, a group that is critical of much standardized testing. “It underpredicts college success for females and those whose best language is not English, and over all, it does not predict college success as well as high school grades, so why do we need the SAT, old or new?”

The reports, called validity studies, are based on individual data from 151,000 students at more than 100 colleges and universities who started college in fall of 2006.

Plans to revise the SAT were announced in 2002, the year after the University of California president, Richard Atkinson, threatened to drop the test as an admission requirement.

“Given the data released today, what was the point of all the hoopla about the SAT’s revisions beyond preserving their California market?” Mr. Schaeffer said. “This is all spin. It’s been a marketing operation from the get-go.” ...