SAT Update

This is from the New York Times:

September 13, 2010, 5:14 pm

Record Number Take SAT, but the Scores of Blacks and Puerto Ricans Lag

By JACQUES STEINBERG

The number of graduating high school students who took the SAT climbed to 1.55 million last spring, a record figure that represents an increase of 1.2 percent, or nearly 18,000, over 2009, the College Board said Monday.
For those readers of The Choice wondering how they measured up, the mean scores over all were 501 in the critical reading section of the test, 516 in math and 492 in the writing section, for a total of 1509. (A perfect score on the three-part exam is 2400.)

The board, the nonprofit organization that oversees the college entrance exam, emphasized the impact of a rigorous high school curriculum on student performance. It said students who took four years of English, and three or more years of math and science, scored, on average, 151 points above those who did not.
But the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, or Fair Test, a critic of the SAT, noted a decline in overall scores since 2006, when the federal No Child Left Behind testing mandates went into effect. When those figures were aggregated by race or ethnicity, the average scores of Asian-Americans climbed 36 points over that period, according to the Fair Test analysis, while those of black and Puerto Rican students fell 14 points, and those of white students decreased by 2 points.