Why Those Falling Test Scores?

Perhaps too much TV, certainly too little hard work in school

Fourteen years ago, scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Tests, those college entrance exams taken with dread each year by a million high school students, began to drift downward--after holding steady for decades. The mean score for verbal ability, measured on the SAT'S 200 to 800 scale, dropped gradually from 478 in the 1962-63 academic year into the 430s. The median mathematics score slipped from 502 into the 470s. In 1975, when the combined score plunged eleven points in just one year, alarmed parents and educators demanded to know why. The widespread concern prompted the College Entrance Examination Board and the Educational Testing Service, which sponsor and develop the exam, to commission an independent panel to study the decline.

Two years, $600,000 and an 8-in.thick volume of data later, the 21-member advisory panel on the SAT score decline delivered its findings last week. As Chairman Willard Wirtz, former Secretary of Labor, brusquely summed up the report, the country has been "off stride for ten years." Although the 75-page final report is fraught with qualifiers in the traditional academic manner, the panel came to some firm conclusions about the nature of American schools--and society --that in the experts' own phrase warrant "careful attention by everybody interested in education."

The panel found that the score decline was initially caused by a more socially varied group taking the SATs. In the 1960s there were "significant increases" in the number of women (who score lower in math), students from low-income families, and minority groups who began to take the tests. By the end of the decade of educational expansion, almost half of all students--compared with a third in 1964--were going on to college. Suddenly the SATs, traditionally taken by an elite college-bound group, broadened to include students entering community colleges and in general those with lower grades. Thus the drop, concluded the panel, was in some degree natural. The "contributing cause," they noted, was not the new group's lower abilities but society's inability to provide educational equality.

After 1970 another factor entered in, this time affecting the elite group: the number of top achievers--those scoring over 600--and middle scorers started to fall alarmingly. The panel traced the subsequent across-the-boards decline to other causes summed up as a general "lowering of educational standards." Among the specific and damning failings cited:

> The high rates of absenteeism now condoned in schools.

> Grade inflation, coupled with grade-to-grade promotion that is viewed as "an entitlement rather than something to be earned."

> "Juvenile writing delinquency," brought on by lack of proper training in reading and writing. Although the group noted that elective subjects had often displaced fundamental English courses, they recommended not a return to the basics but in general "more thoughtful writing, above the present level of gibberish and graffiti."

> Half the homework of former days, and less demanding textbooks with more pictures and wider margins. The panel found that eleventh-grade textbooks are now at a ninth-to tenth-grade level.

In a broader context, the panel noted that the number of children under 18 who live in two-parent homes has dropped from 89% in 1960 to 80% and speculated that family disruption might lower scores. TV was cited as a probable factor: the panel figured that "by age 16, most children have spent between 10,000 and 15,000 hours watching television, more time than they have spent in school." Then, too, the decline in scores took place during a decade of distraction: "political assassination, burning cities and the corruption of national leadership." Finally, the group cited a striking lack of motivation among today's test takers. "It seems a plausible speculation that as opportunities for getting into college have widened, there may have been less concentration of student efforts on preparing for college entrance examinations."

In general, educators endorse the study's findings. "Most factors that the committee pointed to were not strictly school problems, but rather society's problems," says Will Davis, president of the National School Boards Association. For the future, Panel Chairman Wirtz could offer little solid hope. The drop in SAT scores is showing signs of leveling out, but "that is no satisfaction," says Wirtz. "The real question is whether they will go back up."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.