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SPECIAL REPORT: The SAT as a Major Roadblock to Black Students' Aspirations to Higher Education
... The Persistent Racial Scoring Gap on the SAT
In 1976 The College Board published an analysis of the racial differences in scores of the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT). At that time the average black score was about 240 points below the average white score. When The College Board next examined the racial scoring gap in the early 1980s, the gap had shrunk to 200 points. By 1988 the black-white SAT scoring gap was down to 189 points. People in the educational community came to believe that in time the racial scoring gap would disappear altogether. But suddenly progress in closing the SAT gap stopped abruptly and once again it began to open up.
In 2000 the average black score on the verbal portion of the SAT test was 434. On the other hand, the mean white score was 15.7 percent higher at 528. On the math portion of the test, the average score on the SAT for blacks was 426. For whites, the mean score on the math SAT was 17.3 percent higher at 530.
Not only are African-American scores on the SAT far below the scores of whites and Asian Americans, but they also trail the scores of every other major ethnic group in the United States, including Puerto Ricans and Mexican Americans. In fact, American-Indian and Alaskan native students on average score more than 100 points higher than the average score of black students.
Over the past 13 years, there has been only a very small improvement in African-American SAT scores. In 1988 the combined average score for blacks on both the math and verbal sections of the SAT was 847. By 2000 the average black score had risen only 13 points, or about one percent, to 860. In 2000, due to an increase in scores on the math portion of the SAT test, the average black score rose by 4 points from a year earlier, but this came on the heels of a four-point drop the year earlier.
Despite the overall improvement of black SAT scores over the past 13 years, the gap between black and white scores has actually increased. In 1988 the average combined...