High School Sat (cr+m) Scores From Profiles And Other Sources

Papa_Chicken · July 23, 2007, 10:45am

This past winter while scavenging for more college placement reports suitable for posting on the “Top 20 MATRICULATION lists from high school web sites” (<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=97742[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=97742</a> ) thread, I started collecting HS profiles & compiling reported SAT scores. As I gathered more & more, I began searching out any reports of any scores from specific High Schools, ranging from articles to Peterson’s guide, which are secondary sources. Before you wonder why I would take on such a seemingly irrelevant & arduous task, let me just say that as a numbers guy, I did it purely for entertainment….I’ll let you debate the pros & cons of these numbers.

I present below the SAT scores for those schools where the CR+M combined total was => 1200, including some estimations of those scores as a single number from various statistics presented, plus reference web sites. Note that I have not checked the currency of web links in several months, so some might be dead or updated with new data by now.

Couple of notes….

if I found a school’s own reference (primary data), I used that instead of secondary reports.
Although not statistically kosher, I averaged 25%-75% ranges and performed other convenient statistical no-no’s to yield one number per school.
Some schools only report their graduating class through junior year testing…invariably, these scores will be lower than those if reported through senior year. Hence, school-to-school comparisons are only approximate.
in some cases, I made the best guess I could given the available info.
Each high school has a reference link, but in several cases, denoted with a “*” I found multiple years’ of data on multiple web sites, but I only referenced t web site with the most recent data (usually).
I think I found most of the high flying schools….notable schools that I could not pin down were: Dalton, Horace Mann, Brooklyn Friends, & Metairie Park. I am sure there are others that I haven’t found, but I tried to search out all of the top schools.
If a school had multiple years of data, I tended to use only the last 5 or so years.
Many of the Mid-Western schools report both SAT and ACT scores, with the ACT being the predominant test taken by many more students. In those cases, it appears that the SAT scores, taken by fewer students, over represent any given class relative to ACT scores, considering concordance.

Below, I’ll list by High School alphabetically, then provide a list ranked by combined CR + M score for those that scored 1300 or more.

Papa_Chicken · July 23, 2007, 10:46am

High School State Comb CR+M Stat Type ACT Yrs Source

Papa_Chicken · July 23, 2007, 10:47am

High School State Comb CR+M Stat Type ACT Yrs Source

Papa_Chicken · July 23, 2007, 10:49am

High School State Comb CR+M Stat Type ACT Yrs Source

Papa_Chicken · July 23, 2007, 10:52am

High School State Comb CR+M Stat Type ACT Yrs Source

Papa_Chicken · July 23, 2007, 10:55am

152 total found at or above 1300…

High School State Comb CR+M Source

ses · July 23, 2007, 11:25am

I’m going to first admire your dedication to this project.

And then I’m going to say that some of your numbers (specifically for Sidwell Friends) are completely baseless. Sidwell has NEVER released their average SAT scores, as a matter of policy.

And let’s go ahead and assume that the average SAT is actually higher. More than 5% of this year’s graduating class is going to Yale alone, with a total of 20% of this year’s graduates off to Ivies, and that’s without anyone matriculating to Dartmouth.

marite · July 23, 2007, 11:37am

How useful is it to know the average SAT scores at some schools? I’m thinking specifically of those that are bimodal like ours, where children of MIT and Harvard profs attend together with children of low SES, recent immigrants with limited English. Another factor is the rate of SAT participation. According to our superintendent, there is a far higher rate of participation among the bottom quarter than at other schools (of course, this begs the question of how low is the bottom quarter). Again according to him, this lowers the average SAT scores for the school.
This is a school with SAT scores that are below the national average; it has a n 80% graduation rate (in other words, 20% do not pass the high stakes 10th grade exit test). It also sends a significant number of students to the most selective schools in the country. SAT scores would not reveal that.

Papa_Chicken · July 23, 2007, 11:41am

ses-- many schools apparently do not release their numbers on profiles or the like, but apparently Peterson’s & others somehow base their data on something…here’s what Peterson’s reports now for Sidwell friends:
“89% scored over 600 on SAT critical reading, 86% scored over 600 on SAT math”

forgive me, but I do not recall precisely how I guesstimated that one…I think I found some others with like reporting but who also had averages reported on their own web pages, allowing me to extrapolate. I do recall Sidwell Friends & a few others as being difficult to ballpark…be my guest & toss out the ones where I have noted “est”…as these are just guesses by me. I count 10 (out of 576) on the list where I made this “est” notation. By the way, 1360 as an average is not too shabby, and based on all of the data I’ve seen with college placement & SAT scores, 20% going to Ivies fits pretty well with a 1360 average. If you’ve got some better data, please tell us!

jazzymom · July 23, 2007, 11:48am

I don’t see the point of having this information. Doesn’t it become outdated and erroneous almost immediately after you’ve gathered and published it — the numbers will change next year and the year after that?

Did we really need documentation to know that exclusive private schools and well-known magnets are going to have impressively higher than average SAT scores?

doubleplay · July 23, 2007, 11:57am

Does that mean if someone sends their kids to those schools, they’ll get higher SATs?

blossom · July 23, 2007, 11:57am

And since I’m familiar with several schools on your list, let me note that virtually all of the information is incorrect… verfiably incorrect. Enrollment numbers are off by a factor of 10 for several of the private schools on the list; the racial composition information must have been obtained by assuming that anyone not named Li, Park, or Kim is White; the teacher/pupil ratio’s are only accurate if you take total number of staff and divide by student body-- which is great if you care about the lunchroom personnel.

Is it at all meaningfull to compare kiwis to oranges to apples using faulty raw data to get at misleading and incorrect assumptions?

garland · July 23, 2007, 12:08pm

Agreed. Big surprise there.

My kids’ high school SAT average: about 900. Type: run-of-the-mill public.

Dang. Maybe if I’d had a list like this in the past and sent them to a, you know, good school. Maybe they’d gotten into some decent colleges then. ;)

Seriously, while I admire your dedication and hard work, I really can’t see the use of this information, except to make anxious and insecure people more so, ditto smug and/or wealthy folk.

tokenadult · July 23, 2007, 12:37pm

Wow! That’s a lot of searching up information. Thanks. I see one high school in my state has declining averages on both the ACT and SAT.

biggyboy · July 23, 2007, 1:02pm

Some of those scores are outdated…

Most recent report:

Stuyvesant: <a href=“http://schools.nyc.gov/daa/SchoolReports/06asr/102475.PDF[/url]”>http://schools.nyc.gov/daa/SchoolReports/06asr/102475.PDF</a> - 1401
Bronx Science: <a href=“http://schools.nyc.gov/daa/SchoolReports/06asr/210445.PDF[/url]”>http://schools.nyc.gov/daa/SchoolReports/06asr/210445.PDF</a> - 1301
Brooklyn Tech: <a href=“https://schools.nyc.gov/daa/SchoolReports/06asr/313430.PDF[/url]”>https://schools.nyc.gov/daa/SchoolReports/06asr/313430.PDF</a> - 1233

cheers · July 23, 2007, 1:52pm

No, this means that the schools that are able to screen for students via testing take students who score in the 95th percentile and above. From my experience, a child’s 6th grade test scores are fairly predicative of their 11th grade SAT range.

It also means that schools located near major universities draw very clever students.

Thanks for that Papa Chicken. I enjoyed seeing the sweep across the nation.

Oklahoma Science and Math was a shocker. Love to hear the story behind that school.

jonri · July 23, 2007, 3:14pm

I already sent Papachicken data showing that the info for one of the schools is off by 50 points. (Since this is a K-12 school and the enrollment is for the entire school, I suspect what happened is that the SAT scores of 7th and
8th graders for CTY and other programs were included in the data.)

But there is another problem. This thread claims this is CR + M scores. But some of the scores are from 2002. I may be wrong, but I think this is before there was a “CR” score. So I suspect that this list is mixing old V SAT and new CR SAT scores. If so, that’s another reason it is invalid.

midwesterner · July 23, 2007, 4:06pm

For high schools in Illinois, SAT scores are not representative of the school. Note the variance between SAT averages and ACT averages.

All juniors have to take the ACT (about 130,000) but less than ten percent take the SAT. So the SAT scores represent the more ambitious, top-college-bound kids, not the school as a whole.

Papa_Chicken · July 23, 2007, 8:31pm

I’m sorry blossum, but what are you talking about?..the Top 20 thread?

Papa_Chicken · July 24, 2007, 8:44am

via PM…

Hunter (NYC)…1440 median Class of 2007 as juniors (which is much higher than the news article reference cited above circa 2004)…sorry, can’t link the reference profile which is contained on their Naviance page.

jonri-- you are correct thats there’s plenty of mix & match on older “V” and newer “CR”…but given how rough the comparability of this listing is for many reasons (differring time periods, everything reduced rightly or wrongly down to one number, juniors vs seniors, questionable veracity of some sources)…the differences between CR & V are probably noise relative to these other things.

cheers…thought you might enjoy this data dump…yes, its mostly useless for any type of educational pontification, but nevertheless I do find some interesting tidbits, like, as you said cheers…some schools that seem to stand out that I never heard of.

High School Sat (cr+m) Scores From Profiles And Other Sources

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