Cognizant of the fact that this year’s SAT results reveal the same troubling trends as in years prior, College Board officials called for a greater emphasis on boosting preparedness for the growing amount of minority students who take the college entrance exam.
“The latest SAT results reaffirm that we absolutely must address the issue of preparedness much earlier and intervene in a much more focused way than we have in the past,” Cyndie Schmeiser, Chief of Assessment at the College Board, said of the results released Tuesday.
This year’s results show that more students took the exam in 2014 than ever before, as did a higher percentage of minority students and those who qualified for fee waivers. Specifically, 1.67 million students from the class of 2014 took the SAT, an increase over the 1.66 million who took it last year.
And of those who took the exam, 47.5 percent—or nearly 794,000 students—were minority students, up from 45.9 percent in 2013. Similarly, a greater amount of students who took the exam in 2014 did so using a fee waiver—23.6 percent versus 23.4 percent the year prior.
Despite the fact that the greater proportion of minority students and students from families of lesser economic means took the exam in 2014, any enthusiasm over the increases in participation must be tempered by the fact that less than half of all SAT takers met the exam’s “college and career readiness benchmark.”
Only 42.6 percent of SAT takers in 2014 met the benchmark, which the College Board identifies as a score that signifies that students are ready to take college-entry, credit-bearing courses and not need remediation.
