<p>As these are raw, & the post-mid-90's scores are recentered, keep in mind that viewing the absolute numbers from year to year might be skewed because of the recentering, but I thought it was interesting nevertheless to see which states had improved the most, & vice versa.</p>
<p>I threw all of this database into a spreadsheet, calculated % changes from start to finish (87-88 to 04-05) by state. Here are the top 10 improvers and deprovers by Verbal/Math and state:</p>
<p>VERBAL: TOP 10 IMPROVING STATES
Illinois ...................... 10.0%
Minnesota ..................... 8.4%
Wisconsin ..................... 7.8%
Missouri ....................... 7.5%
Michigan ..................... 6.8%
North Carolina ................ 4.4%
Colorado ...................... 4.3%
South Carolina ................ 3.6%
Georgia ....................... 3.5%
North Dakota .................. 3.1%</p>
<p>VERBAL: TOP 11 DE-PROVING STATES<br>
Pennsylvania .................. -0.2%
Florida ....................... -0.2%
Texas ......................... -0.2%
Arizona ...................... -0.9%
West Virginia ........... -0.9%
Rhode Island .................. -1.0%
Utah .......................... -1.0%
Wyoming ................. -1.1%
Montana ....................... -1.3%
Delaware ...................... -1.4%
Nevada ........................ -1.7%</p>
<p>MATH: TOP 10 IMPROVING STATES<br>
Illinois ...................... 12.2%
Missouri ....................... 9.1%
Minnesota ..................... 8.7%
North Carolina ................ 8.7%
Wisconsin ..................... 8.7%
Michigan ..................... 8.6%
South Carolina ................ 6.6%
North Dakota .................. 6.3%
Massachusetts ................ 5.6%
Kansas ........................ 5.6%</p>
<p>MATH: TOP 10 DE-PROVING STATES<br>
Delaware ...................... 1.8%
Rhode Island .................. 1.8%
Arizona ...................... 1.3%
New Mexico .................... 0.7%
Utah .......................... 0.7%
Florida ....................... 0.6%
Nevada ........................ 0.6%
Wyoming ................. -0.4%
Montana ....................... -1.3%
West Virginia ........... -1.5%</p>
<p>Overall.....Verbal +0.6% & Math +3.8%</p>
<p>Interesting to me to see how, in general, the upper midwest & southeast appear to be the rising stars here. What's up with Illinois? Wow, they must be doing something right. Or perhaps more "top students" are now taking the SAT in addition to the ACT.</p>
<p>I'd be interested to know what the raw numbers are - was there a similar increase in the number of students taking the test or a decrease - also what score level are we talking about here.
Many of those are the ACT states, and the numbers and types of students that would be taking the SAT would be quite self-selected.</p>
<p>cangel-- quick look on the greater report where the OP'd table was derived provided no answers to your questions. I did see that pre-mid-90's SAT scores were adjusted to account for the recentering, so the SAT scores provided on the linked table are more apples-to-apples than I had thought. Also, there is some ACT information, but its not broken down by state.</p>
<p>Papa Chicken, rising SAT scores in a state can mean almost anything. It could mean improved educational quality.</p>
<p>It also could mean that the high schools are teaching towards the test. SATs are coachable! It just takes several years to do it right. If a high school includes a lot of volcabulary in English, and they do a lot of SAT math problems in Algebra and geometry, it could significantly raise the average SAT scores without raising the quality of the education. In fact, it could actually cause a degradation in the education.</p>
<p>taxguy, yes, & I seem to recall that one of the chapters in the recently popular Freakonomics book was about catching Chicago teachers cheating on system-wide student proficiency tests! Too many variables in this soup to glean much...just thought it was an interesting set of data.</p>
<p>Some numbers for Illinois - straight from the College Board</p>
<p>Year Tests Ver Mat Total</p>
<p>1998 18529 564 581 1145</p>
<p>2002 14707 596 578 1174</p>
<p>2006 12694 591 609 1200</p>
<p>Scores are up, but not number of tests. My speculation is that Illinois scores cannot be compared to SAT-centric states**, as it is evident that the students who take the SAT in ACT country form a self-selecting group that takes the SAT (and Subject Tests) in preparation for an application to a very selective school. The fact that many schools started to relax the SAT only requirement is actually causing the number of SAT to decrease.</p>
<p>** FWIW, this makes a comparative of states almost meaningless.</p>
<p>Illinois REQUIRES that HS juniors take the ACT. Consequently, students headed for state schools or less competitive privates don't bother with the SAT.</p>
<p>Only public schools in Illinois are required to administer the ACT. Private schools are exempt. But this indeed is the heart of ACT territory. Most kids, whether stronger or weaker students, begin their standardized testing with the ACT, both because it's better known in this state than the SAT and also because they get to decide which ACT test sittings to send to colleges. (Frankly, for this reason alone, I think everybody ought to begin with the ACT!) In general, around here it's the kids who are not satisfied with their performance on the ACT who tend to turn to the SAT to see if they can do better.</p>
<p>Addendum to the preceding post. The SAT is fairly "exotic" around here. No hard evidence, but I think that many of the kids who eventually take a shot at the SAT because they're dissatisfied with their ACT scores are better-than-average students shooting for more selective schools. That may account for the relatively high SAT scores in Illinois.</p>
<p>Only about 7% of Wisconsin juniora take the SAT in a given year. The ones who do are most likely strong students who are applying to east coast or west coast schools or those who need to confirm for National Merit. My guess is that the same is true in Minnesota as well. Few, if any, high schools in either of these states are going to teach to the test. However, since it is the strongest students who are more likely to take it, the data will be scewed because you are looking at dissimilar samples.</p>
<p>The above is also true for North Dakota. Fewer than 100 students take the test in an average year, and most of those 100 are strong students who need to take the SAT in order to apply to more selective out-of-state schools.</p>
<p>It is a myth that one must take the SAT to apply to more selective schools. Virtually every college in the country (there may be a handful of holdouts -- Harvey Mudd, Wake Forest, Caltech??) now happily accepts the ACT.</p>
<p>There appears to be some substantial bias in this data, at least compared to the PSAT cutoff scores required for National Merit semi-finalist. Although the 99th percentile is not necessarily directly correlated with the average, it seems unlikely that a state such as Alabama would have such high average SAT scores compared to Massachusetts and New Jersey but such low PSAT cutoff scores if nearly everyone were taking both tests.</p>
<p>I think it has everything to do with the proportion of high school students in each state who take the SAT.</p>
<p>In the midwest community I lived in until recently, only students looking to go out of region were really motivated to take the SAT- a small portion of the class, most likely to be top students. The state U's expected ACTs. The culture there is that most students, even most of the good ones, go to the state u. </p>
<p>In contrast, I would imagine a significantly higher proportion of the student bodies in NY and NJ take the SATs. The ACT was not traditionally part of the culture here, though increasing quite recently. When you dig deeper into the class, you find a lot of weaker students taking the exam in these states. Proportionally.</p>
<p>Yep. As much as I appreciate the research (and I DO appreciate the time and effort very much), I don't find the data particularly useful. As many have pointed out, the Midwest states represent a small and non-representative sample. The Southeastern states were, in many cases, so far behind the rest of the nation that small improvement register. States already performing well have a more difficult time making those improvements.</p>
<p>"If a high school includes a lot of volcabulary in English, and they do a lot of SAT math problems in Algebra and geometry, it could significantly raise the average SAT scores without raising the quality of the education. In fact, it could actually cause a degradation in the education."</p>
<p>Taxguy, I can't agree that including a lot of vocabulary study and math problem solving leads to a decline in the overall quality of education. The phrase "teaching to the test" is thrown around rather loosely, I think. If you are referring to endless in-class SAT prep time, then I agree with you, but increasing the time devoted to formal vocabulary study and problem solving is time well-spent. (Yes, I agree that the best way to improve vocabulary is to do a lot of reading, but it doesn't hurt to see new words in a formal setting as an adjunct to absorbing them in context.)</p>