Musings about the SAT

CC_Admin
Wed, 04 Jan 2006 01:49:47 +0000

Hey don’t stereotype people from Arkansas. That sounds more like Tennessee folk if you ask me. Bill Clinton’s from Arkansas and he went to Yale. It was for law school not as an undergrad, but still.

Being serious for a moment, I’m glad someone brought this up, because it’s something that’s been on my mind. I know that last year the average SAT score for the 40 kids at my hs that took the test was about 850. I go to school in the ghetto, 90 percent of the student pop. is non-white and some 60 percent are on free/reduced lunch, so unfortunately the low student achievement is almost what you’d expect. Now compare that to another hs in my district which is feed by students from affluent, well-educated backgrounds and the average SAT score is 1200. Without drifting into the complexities of the race/class/gender gaps in SAT scores, I think it’s fair to generalize that home environment and to an extent school environment influences how a student performs on the SAT. So it’s not entirely accurate to use the SAT as a gage for intellectuality vitality or really anything else since there’s more that goes into a score than smarts.