Education: Decline in the SATs

In New York City last week the College Entrance Examination Board issued a profile of the 1,000,000 American 1973 high school seniors who took its Scholastic Aptitude Tests (SAT). The profile revealed many noteworthy facts (girls got higher average scores, for example, yet had less ambitious college plans than boys). But one seemingly ominous result attracted the most attention: the mean SAT scores had declined for the tenth year in a row. The biggest drop was in this year's verbal scores, from a mean of 450 in 1971-72 to 443 in 1972-73. That compared to a verbal mean of 478 in...

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