Gender, Race and the SAT

The College Board just released its report on national and state average results from the first-ever cohort of college students (the high-school class of 2006) to take the new SAT, first offered in March 2005, which ditched the old "verbal" section for "critical reading," added more advanced math content, and added an essay-based writing section.

Most media reports seem to be focusing on the state horserace or the fact that this year's critical reading subtest averages are somewhat lower than last year's verbal score averages. I'm not sure either of these is very informative, since the population of kids taking the SAT differs from state to state, and the new SAT the college board started administering in March 2005 is a different test from that administered in previous years.

Also gaining attention is the impact of the new writing section on average male-female SAT score differences. Historically, men have had higher average scores than women, not just on the SAT overall but also on both its verbal and math subsections--a departure from other assessments where men tend to do better than women on math (with a few caveats), but women tend to do better on verbal skills. But women did do better than men, on average, on the new writing section, lowering the the male-female score gap from 42 points in 2005 to 26 points this year. In addition to the writing section, the new critical reading section, which eliminated the infamous verbal analogies, probably also made the test more female-friendly, since verbal analogies are one of the few areas of verbal skills in which men typically outperform women, and the difference between men's critical reading scores this year and their verbal skills last year is larger than that for women.

Because women's improved SAT performance relative to men reflects changes in the assessment and not simply changes in students' skills, it shouldn't be taken as evidence of a boy crisis. But is men's continued higher average SAT performance--in both reading and math--evidence against a boy crisis? The answer is no. First, the difference between male and female reading scores on the SAT is tiny. More significant, the populations of men and women taking the test are different. More females than males take the SAT--54% of SAT-takers in the 2006 college-bound cohort were girls--and, because students in the highest segments of the achievement distribution for each gender are already pretty likely to take the SAT, the larger pool of women taking it probably means more women from lower on the achievement are taking the test--and a look at the gender breakdowns of students by score distribution backs this up.

Finally, it's worth pointing out that, once again, gender gaps are much smaller on the SAT than are racial and ethnic gaps. And the SAT results seem to buttress the notion that we should be particularly concerned about African-American males, who are the lowest-performing racial/gender subgroup, trailing their sisters in math and, unlike males from other racial/ethnic groups, reading, even as males make up a smaller percentage of African-American SAT-takers than they do any other racial/ethnic group.

By the Way...If you want to hear and talk more about gender gaps in education from K-12 through higher ed, please join Education Sector on Tuesday, September 12 at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, for a discussion with USA Today's Richard Whitmire, Georgetown and the Urban Institute's Harry Holzer, and yours truly. It's free, but space is limited, so RSVP quickly!