From: jmc@SAIL.Stanford.EDU (John McCarthy)
Subject: decline in SAT scores very little genetic
Reply-To: jmc@cs.Stanford.EDU
Organization: Computer Science Department, Stanford University
Date: 16 Dec 92 23:26:55

Reading "What's really behind the SAT-score decline?" by Charles Murray
and R.J. Herrnstein in _The Public Interest_ Winter 1992 has convinced
me that very little of the decline in SAT scores since 1963 (the peak
year) can be due to failure of high scorers to reproduce.  The reason
is the large fluctuations, the careful isolation of the trends in
white scores by M and H.  Instead it is due to educational fads which
have been especially harmful to the verbal abilities of students
in the upper range of ability.  The dumbing down of the textbooks
and the dumbing down of the literature requirements are perhaps
the main problems.

They say:

     The main conclusion ... is that, in the case of the national
     SAT scores you see reported in the newspapers, what you see
     is what you get.  When everything is considered, the size of
     the drop in the SAT as shown in that familiar,
     unsphisticated graphic with which we opened the article is
     about the size and shape of the authentic drop in the
     academic preparation of the white SAT population.  Neither
     race, class, parental education, nor gender can explain this
     decline of approximately 50 points on the verbal score and
     25 on the math for the white SAT-taking population.

...

     For the nation's students as a whole, the recovery from the
     bottom of the trough in the 1970s seems to be complete: they
     are probably doing about as well as they were in the
     supposedly halcyon days of the 1950s and early 1960s.  This
     does not Mean that they are well educated by absolute
     standards, nor that they are well-educated enough to meet
     the challenges from ever-stronger competitors overseas, only
     that things are no worse in the United States than they used
     to be.

     For the pool of students who take the SAT, a group that is
     far above the average in ability, the story since the 1950s
     seems designed those who want to blame the SAT decline on
     the expansion of the SAT population: (1) The great surge in
     the proportion of high school students taking the SAT
     occurred in the 1950s and early 1960s - while test scores
     held steady; (2) The beginning of the decline in test
     scores, 1964, coincided with a nearly flat period in the
     proportion of students taking the test; (3) The decline in
     test scores from 1969 to 1976 occurred when the proportion
     of students taking the SAT was shrinking; and (4) The pool
     began to expand again in the 1980s - at just the time when
     the scores began to rise as well.

     Nor can changes in the socioeconomic composition of the pool
     easily be blamed. ...

"From meritocracy to mediocracy" is the title of the section in which
they blame the problem on the dumbing down of the college track.

The major question that is untreated in the article is how the
non-public schools did over this period, and how the scores of
their students relates to the extent to which they followed the
educational fads.
--
John McCarthy, Computer Science Department, Stanford, CA 94305
*
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.

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