Math Scores Fell in Nearly Every State, and Reading Dipped on National Exam-Based Growth Trends
The Nation’s Young Adults in the Nation’s Older Adults (NEA) who took the SAT last year did better not only in their own state and metro area, but they also had a sharper increase in scores than the overall group of students from the previous year. So did students who grew up in the South, the West, and the Northeast.
The results were released yesterday as part of the College Board’s annual report on high school progress of students nationally and nationally. It looks at reading and math scores in public and private middle schools in the nation’s middle schools. The results include data from the year 2000, and the trends are based on the results for the 2004 and 2007-08 school years. (In the case of graduation rates, these measures are based on the 2005-06 assessment.)
Here are the results for the top 25 states and the top 25 metro areas with the largest number of students in the most recent year of the survey who took either the SAT or ACT:
1. New Jersey had the largest increase overall in reading and writing in the year before the survey, but it showed the sharpest increase in math. This was the third straight year of improvement in New Jersey, which has posted strong gains in the SAT and ACT.
2. In New Jersey, the percentage of high school students who took either the SAT or ACT increased to the highest level since the program began in 1999. In general, though, the percentages of New Jersey students in the top 25 for both subjects declined:
SAT Reading/Writing
TOTAL Reading/Writing
% Change
% Change
% Change
N.J.
37.1
33.6
4.3
-2.1
4.4
13.8
10.5
-7.0
